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Caprice no. 18



Perpetual motion pieces are NOT my strong point, so this caprice definitely gave me a run for it. However, as a musician, I love a good challenge. So I came away from my work on this caprice deciding that fast pieces are, indeed, fun to play. But they need the proper amount of drills and practice time (ie, a LOT more than you initially think) to settle in!

Because of the amount of drill work involved, memorization was the easy part. There was one caveat: mm. 39-47, which fall into an A - A' pattern. Here I really had to switch tracks quickly with my brain, to not get stuck in an A-A loop pattern.

The trickiest section was the double trills at mm. 14-16. Instead of really digging in , I tried to haze over the notes a little, since my fourth finger was not always reliable. The last three measures of the piece pose a real challenge for intonation: switching between the E and B Major chords harkens back to Caprice no. 15!

My favorite passage is mm. 60-64. I had fun shaping the bow stroke, and love the chromatic line against the pedal tone. It has a fun-house mirror effect, in a piece with lots of twists and turns. As I'm writing this, an image of a fast, loopy waterslide has popped into my head. That is what this piece feels like to play!

As with most of these caprices, this one lacks nearly any direction in shaping or dynamics. But much of it is intuitive, once you play it through enough.







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