How to study things like the opening of Chopin 2nd Ballade...

[mikkeljs]

This piece has gone on my nerves since I started playing it almost a year ago. For all my other repertoire I use to be able to see all the problems in front of me and exactly how to work with them, just except for the opening of the 2nd Ballade. The Ballade is a very hard piece to make perfect, several things are almost superhuman to express good enought, but the only thing that kept being a serious problem was for me this slow beginning...

I have a very complete musical understanding of that part, supplied with several masterclasses, and I am able to study it note by note with such a fixed interpretation as if it were Stockhausen. But my teacher kept talking about romantic sound or rather romantic approach, so that I should be more spontanous and flexible in sound, and definately not study it note by note.

After months of work with spontanous approach, it only got worse. It´s not a musical challenge but only technically to form out the phrases very accurate, and I concluded every day that there was simply way too much information in each phrase to let them be studied from only one impulse. Just because the sound should be flexible, it should still be musical and precise. When something seems very difficult, we always isolate the problems, right? and then take them step by step. As do I with elements of articulation and phrasing. But now my teacher asked me to find an easier way and just letting the music flow from my brain to the keys. So of cause I would try to learn from it, when my teacher speaks of it.

At the masterclass the professor said the opposite, that I should study it note by note, and he started focusing on the very exact outcome of sound on each note seperated. I ended up spending 3 weeks practicing the first 5 notesC-C-C-C-C, which only made them worse and made me angry and sad...

My overall conclusion is very confused but it seems that I was right from the beginning - Chopin 2nd Ballade opening should be studied like a precise mathematical construction with a fixed interpretation, note by note. Or is there any other way?? I am desperate to learn, and some people claim that there is another way. But why haven´t I found it then, and how can you transfer 20-30 informations into the hand within seconds without isolating the informations first? If I could do that, I would be able to play all Liszts etudes perfectly prima vista!  

anyone on this board who played the 2nd Ballade?

[mikkeljs]

or can I ask in another way:

what does romantic sound mean?

or what does romantic mean at all?