MHirsch Mozart is easy to sight-read. Everything makes sense and is crystal clear.
If you can read music maybe, which I can't 😅 as you can see I don't have anything to read in front of me.
MHirsch Personally, I can live with some imperfection. Imperfection is very human.
Yes, I agree. I am not saying it should be "perfect", because otherwise I'd just have the computer play it and it would sound even less musical!
Here is my speculation, which I am not educated enough (yet!! working hard on that) to be sure.
The player can make two kinds of mistakes: a rhythmic mistake and a melodic (note) mistake. Both of them may have a harmonic consequence.
For rhythmic mistakes, I agree with what the usual suspect (Phil Best) says in this video, even though I don't particularly like his feminine/masculine/marriage metaphor (and it still feels a bit like hand waving):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TK8zzYvMT8
tl;dw; in my words, good rhythm is not being metronomic or not making mistakes, but it is fully feeling the rhythm and being technically able to fully express that. I find Mozart quite difficult in this regard (and Phil briefly glosses over that in the above video).
For melodic mistakes, if the player stays in the same scale/tonality it's fine. If it goes in another scale (or if it misses a modulation), the mistake becomes harmonic, so it's definitely more noticeable by even casual listeners. I believe Mozart often makes modulations for a very short time, and/or using very few notes or even just one: if you miss that one note, the whole modulation goes belly up. So you need to both understand the harmony (which somewhat I do), know the scales (which I do, but not perfectly) and the chords (ditto) and have full control of everything, to make sure a potential mistake is acceptable (and here is where it fails for me: my posted video is best of 5 or 6 attempts, a random one would be worse). So you can still have a lot of rhythmic and melodic mistakes, and sound great, as long as the harmony is not messed up too much. With baroque and romantic repertoire, the harmony stays in one place for longer before modulating, and the rhythm is more "groovy", so all of these issues are less noticeable -- or so I speculate.
Thank you! I worked hard on both, and while I'm ok with the results (compared to what I was able to do in the past, which was "simply avoid Mozart"), I think I still have a lot of work to make it good… even if I could play "on demand" at this level (which as I said I can't). But my teacher believes (and I agree), that after a certain point there's no gain in continuing to perfectioning one piece: you have to move on and perhaps go back to it after a year or two once you've learned more (technically, artistically and stylistically).
