Piano Trio Postgrad Coaching Royal College of Music, London

November 15, 2021By Susie Meszarospiano trio coaching

Coaching a New Piano Trio

a post grad piano trio with Susie Meszaros

I’m here with 3 Royal College of Music postgrads; Daniel (piano), Lotte (cello) and Sangbin (violin), who I’ve not actually worked with before. We were in the East Parry room, a performance space right at the top of the Royal College. Looking out of the window on one side you see the Royal Albert Hall.

This first time, we had just an hour.  They’re a very promising group, all of them approaching really intelligently, with great dedication. All players are very advanced instrumentalists. You can really help them get very deep into the music, because they have no technical challenges. It’s working with a marvellous material already. I can really push forward and challenge them in a musical sense. We did some really good work in a very short space of time.

It’s lovely when you get to the heart of good heart ideas in a very short space of time.

Schubert E Flat Piano Trio

They played the slow movement of the E flat piano trio by Schubert – which needs a lot of sustaining. It doesn’t play itself. It’s quite protracted music and so you have to sustain it with really intelligent ideas about phrasing, about how you produce your sound, how the piano and strings can play together, because of course, they’re such different instruments to each other, but they must blend together. 

Comparing string quartet with piano trio

It’s easier in a string quartet because you have four instruments in the same family. In a piano trio, you have two stringed instruments. The action of the piano and the way it produces everything is completely different. Piano has to learn from strings and vice versa. They need imitate each other when necessary and be very different at other points in the music. It takes a lot of thought, observation and listening.

I teach at Royal of Music, London and Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester. Find out more about my private teaching for amateurs, professionals and in person and online via Zoom.

Royal College Music Professor Talks Beethoven String Quartet

July 24, 2020By Susie MeszarosTalking Beethoven Op. 18 No. 3

 

Susie on Beethoven's String Quartet Op 18 No. 3

Extract: In this short video talk, Royal College of Music, Royal Northern College Music Professor, Susie Mészáros, contextualises Beethoven's longing, searching for a more transcendent spirituality, reflected in his music, within the context of the Enlightenment. Beethoven was in his late twenties. It was only at this stage in his career after writing trios, violin and cello sonatas, septets, that he felt ready to take on the medium of the string quartet. There is nothing ostentatious about this string quartet. Beethoven could almost pick up a tune from the street and craft it into something extremely sophisticated and beautiful. This quartet still has all the hallmarks of classical writing and structure, except his journeys into keys, into texture and kind material he uses, which is perhaps more fragmentary and elusive than his predecessors, Haydn and Mozart.

The Budapest String Quartet performance 1951

(Listen to the Budapest String Quartet play Op 18 No. 3 below)

The Budapest String Quartet (Joseph Roisman - Jac Gorodetzky - Boris Kroyt - Mischa Schneider)
Studio recording, 29.XI.1951

tonal purple illustration of Beethoven

Personal Memory of Mischa Schneider

A curious personal recollection of my own. In 1983 I was in the Marlboro Summer School in Vermont, which had been started by Rudolph Serkin and Adolf Busch.  I worked closely with Mischa Schneider who at that time was too old to play, but sat in on all rehearsals and coached us every day. One really felt the depth of understanding for the music and quartet playing.  His help was musical, intellectual, practical. He was a very personable man.

It felt like holding the hand of history. I remember feeling that he continued to discover the music himself. It felt like he was playing in the quartet.