Cziffra Improvising On Dvorak

There are no real words for this. There are loads of other new cziffra films on youtube I never encountered before, including a complete la campanella.

There are no real words for this. Very impressive, yes. Don't you think that anybody who is serious about piano playing should also try themselves in composition and in arranging/adapting works by others? Paul

Very impressive, yes. Don't you think that anybody who is serious about piano playing should also try themselves in composition and in arranging/adapting works by others? Paul I absolutely agree with this, though I'm sure it was my pop music education that convinced me of this. I've learned so much from pulling apart, transcribing and arranging the work of others - I feel I have more idea of what is possible with the instrument even if my efforts produce inferior work than the original. Composing is also a fascinating process for me, though I'm more of a tinkerer - I play around with ideas that I have but tend not to finish them. Improvisation, to me, is a purity of expression which I'm aiming for because it combines the creative process with the end result and leaves no room for doubt. When I practise easier pieces these days I tend to improvise things like ornaments and embellishments, or take an idea from the piece and build an improvisation around that. Again the work produced might be inferior to the original, but I learn a lot from it and I feel it makes me a more complete musician. ---------------------- I looked up the complete version of La Campanella - it's wonderful! It was also very informative for me to see just how much Cziffra moves into ulnar deviation in some circumstances. I'd avoided doing such a thing recently because I felt it caused me problems, but since seeing the video I've played around with it and have found a more functional way of doing it.

Cziffra occasionally uses UD and that's unavoidable. But some of this I would refer to as positioning individual fingers in line with the arm in order to avoid tension- a subject that was very dear to his fellow student in Budapest Sandor, a pupil of Bartok. Cziffra had a strong hand that could support all kinds of tensions but at the same time he was unusually extremely loose in his arms wrists and shoulders (and fingers). I beleive that this ability to change from tension to total relaxation in nanoseconds explains why he was superior to most pianists in some aspects. He had a nice touché and nice sound but was not close to eg Horowitz when it comes to orchestration. And that is a matter of choice you can't have it all. Like Horowitz he stayed most of the time in the range p-mf. He liked improvising and as a former bar-pianist he knew this game, something that's often completely absent with classical pianists (myself included). But these skills had little to do with him playing classical-if at all. Nobody had a more meticulous method than Cziffra. He studied the scoores and learnt every detail perfectly by heart in an armchair before trying anything on the piano. Than he started of very very slowly on the piano playing/learning two bars at a time. When the piece was more or less ready he could start anywhere and he checked up by playing only odd pages and then only even pages. When he played his mind was always ahead in the score. He also had a way with passages that gave a virtuosic impression and that was a kind of very personal phrasings with sudden accelerations/decelerations (in full speed). I guess he got that from the fiery gypsymusic he knew well. I think his father was a cimbalplayer but I'm not sure. So it's all (well almost) comes down to an enourmos amount of work.... eric