Anyone who has listened to jazz knows how players improvise by making up their own variations on the melody of the original song.  It sounds and looks like fun, doesn’t it?  At first glance, classical music doesn’t seem to offer the same chance to “jam” unless you’re a composer.  But, that’s not strictly true!

One of the genres of classical music is the concerto which is a solo with orchestral accompaniment.  (Many times you will hear concertos performed with piano accompaniment since the logistics are obviously much easier that way!)  Many of my students play their first concerto after studying for three or four years.  It’s often Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Major.  The simpler concertos tend to be from the Baroque era and are played as written on the page.

In the Classical concertos of Quantz and Mozart, however, each movement has a moment towards the end when the accompaniment comes to a dramatic pause on an anticipatory chord and the soloist adds her own personal touch through an unaccompanied cadenza that plays with the musical ideas of the composer.  Cadenzas can be just a few breaths worth of notes (more historically accurate) or as long as a whole page.  They are often a chance to show off technique and should always be free and expressive.  For students of classical music, it can be hard to suddenly throw the metronome out of the window and I often spend a lot of time encouraging students to add excitement through making the tempo very flexible and adding dramatic pauses.

You can absolutely play a cadenza composed by someone else and, for the Mozart concertos, there are wonderful cadenzas written by Jean-Pierre Rampal, Paul Taffanel, Philipe Gaubert and Johannes Donjon.  In lessons, we study and learn these before my students take out their own blank manuscript paper.  As you’ll hear below from my student Leen, cadenza writing is not a favorite activity in my studio.  But after we spend a few weeks of repeating the assignment, cajoling, cheerleading and finding the potential in their ideas, each student ends up with an unique cadenza that inevitably makes their concerto performance extra special.

Leen van Besien is in her fifth year of studying with me and has just written her fourth cadenza.  Here is a recording of her cadenza for the first movement of Mozart’s Concerto in G Major (K 313), followed by her candid thoughts on cadenza writing.

leen-cadenza

I absolutely HATE the process of writing a cadenza.  I always have to make sure that no one else is in the house before I shut myself up in my room and begin.  While I try out various idea, I always cringe because, more often than not, it sounds pretty stupid.  Eventually, after several hours hard work, I’ll have about 30 seconds of music.  I’ll show up to my lesson and uncomfortably play through my cadenza.  Then, miraculously, after working with Ms. Ko for about 10 minutes on it, it will actually sound semi-real!  As I get more comfortable with it, it gets more and more convincing until finally I’m not embarrassed. 

Everyone thinks it’s cool when I tell them I wrote a cadenza and the finished product is usually something I can be proud of.  If I can write a cadenza, believe me, anyone can.  I usually just take random bits from the piece and stitch them together rather awkwardly, but with some dramatic slowing down and speeding up, it doesn’t sound half-bad.  Actually writing it is tough, but when performing a concerto, having your own cadenza is something special and worthwhile.

Thanks for sharing with us, Leen and I hope that our readers have a chance to hear your cadenza live some time this spring!