COMING UP: How-to-Paganini Series
I am happy to announce that I am starting a new series regarding Paganini 24 Caprices. I will be sharing tips and tricks on how to practice them.
In addition to that, I will be publishing my own edition in the next days, with my own fingering and bowing suggestions.
Paganini’s 24 Caprices are actually very interesting. As a kid, I always wanted to play technically demanding pieces, because I found the people who did so impressive. To be able to manage all these difficult passages, technical work, tenth’s, double harmonics, left-hand pizzicatos, up and down-bow staccatos, ricochets, rapid string crossings, finger octaves… They show the highest levels of craftsmanship a violinist can reach, and Paganini was the pinnacle to arrive at for me, in order to consider myself a good violinist as a kid.
But, I made the mistake of considering them just for the sake of the showing-off of the technicality - something I notice that a lot of violinists still only consider these works as.
Of course, my musical understanding evolved beyond the point of just improving my technical abilities. There is much more to it if you really want to be an impressive musician and a violinist. But at the same time, you can and should play Paganini Caprices in a much more musical way, and not just regard them as a bunch of technical passages to overcome.
While I finally accomplished my goal of recording them last year at the Tonhalle Zürich, I think it is still true that many young violinists still aspire to be able to play the Caprices at some point. While there was barely anyone who played them 60-70 years ago (the great Italian violinist Ruggiero Ricci did the very first complete recording of Paganini 24 Caprices in 1947), they’ve been recorded by some great violinists since then.
I predict that these tips will not only guide my young violinist friends. Adults might also find them helpful, who started playing the violin at a later age - or advanced students who are on the path to a serious musical career, who are looking to add some of Paganini’s works to their repertoire.
One should regard technicality as a tool to create better music, as I read in an interview made with Alexander Markov on Andante (a Turkish classical music magazine) many years ago. Well, Paganini 24 Caprices are not an exception. I will give you tips on executing the technical passages effortlessly, but not only that, I will complement them with ideas about phrasings (which sometimes makes the technical work easier!), in order to make them much more interesting.
Stay tuned for what is upcoming!
In the meantime, you can watch my full album below as a playlist on YouTube, or listen on Spotify.
