Mozart's Adagio in B Minor

We wanna explore what it means that might be being said here.

Well, first of all, like the Adagio is, is a pretty popular piece.

I've heard a lot of, uh, younger people, adolescents, uh, even young children studying this work.

And while it's, um, not incredibly difficult, like the, um, the extracting of the musical essence is the difficult part here.

So first off, we start here.

[piano] It's Adagio, remember.

There's a...

There needs to be a singing tone.

Uh, we talked about singing tone in our last episode on Schubert's D. 664, the third movement, and it applies to every piece we do, in fact.

So the singing tone, you have to be deep in the keys, even if you're playing relatively softly, relatively differently in terms of touch.

In the Russian piano school, we talk a lot about intonation.

What kind of intonation are you trying to get out of a work? So here we go.

[piano] So that's the very first two bars.

Lot going on there.

It's also ending in a little bit of a suspense, a question.

Why is this happening to me? [piano] Okay, I missed that part for a section, but let's go and o- over and talk about, a little bit about what we were kind of thinking and doing.

So after the first two-bar intro, [piano] be careful not to do something.

You're in a soft...

There is a sforzando, a forte, uh, in [piano] but it doesn't mean you bang and, and, and play at the loudest, uh, dynamic that a modern piano can do.

No. It's relative to how you're playing.

[piano] Yeah, and be careful not to do [piano].

Yes, that's the indication on the score.

It's slurred.

There are groupings.

The, um, articulation that's collectively what, what we call this is written as such, but be careful not to be overeager [piano] to show that and break the musical line.