Edvard Grieg is one of those composers that has a certain dark spice to his compositions. One of the great pieces that I played for one of the recitals that I did was from Grieg’s book of lyrical pieces. The piece is called the Opus 12 No. 2—“Waltz”. It is a very quick piece complete with fast triplets and unique pauses that add a certain artistic flair to the piece. The certain staccato nature of the piece demands a certain feel of the keys. The velocity of the piece is everywhere which requires a great deal of technical skill in order to make it work, especially because of the nature of the fast tempo. This is only the first movement. After this, the pace changes to a slower more cantabile sort of nature which is something fabulous. There is still a bunch of great lyrical and melodic material that is of the major and harmonic minor flavor. Toward the end the tempo begins to pick up again back in the home key. The contrasting section is still uptempo but it goes into the parallel major (A Major). Then, after a brief break, the waltz turns back to the A minor and quickly foils out in the end.
The recommendation is to play this piece rather slowly at first to get all the embellishments or techniques in accurately, as you would with any other difficult or fast piano passages. Then, slowly build up the tempo until you are at the level of Presto or Grazia. You have to play this piece in a highly lively manner. You will soon find that you are a much more fluid and agile piano player with this piece.
The hardest part of the piece that I could say for performance at this particularly fast tempo is executing the vast amount of triplets in this. You have to slow the piece down to get the triplets if you are a piano player and you have trouble with doing triplets because you have this three against 1 unit that is in every four or so-called measures. Also, if you listen to this piece, do you realize that the tempo starts off fast but then ritardandos or slows down at the end of every phrase? To let you know, it is not just a tempo issue that is addressed in this piece. It has also to do with musical flair and putting some feeling and some heart to the piece. If you start playing this piece, you will note the phrasing is done this way for a reason. This will make you a better piano player. It certainly improves one’s technique.
