Impromptus D899 (Op. 90)

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Impromptu in E-Flat Major - Walkthrough (2)

Bars 4 - 19

4. Spring off the first-beat crotchet of bars 6, 7 and 8 and enjoy the syncopation as you land on the chord, where a touch of pedal adds resonance.
5. Play more legato in f – deeper into the key, very lyrically, and always with melodic shaping. Think of the RH as a melodic line, allowing it to relax slightly and breathe at phrase ends.
6. The opening eight-bar phrase is repeated, this time forte. Rather than simply playing it in the same way as the opening, only louder, experiment with bringing out the bass line a little more.

7. In bar 7 the RH figuration descends to get to the low E flat for the start of the next phrase. In bar 15, it ascends to get to the higher octave. In performance, this sudden change of direction can easily confuse the mind and the fingers, and is a source of memory problems in this piece. To avoid this, it is well worth highlighting the following bars: for the descending pattern - 7, 175 (lower octave) and 23, 191 (higher octave); for the ascending pattern - 15, 58, 183, 226. Go through each spot regularly, practising the bar before, the bar itself and the bar after for ultimate security.
8. This is a variant of the opening eight bars, the RH now playing an octave higher (bar 24 is itself a variant of bar 8, in order to bring the line back down). Schubert was very fond of the sparkling high treble register of the piano, this type of writing is found in many of his works.

Resources For complete score, see Practising the Piano Annotated Study Edition (click here)