23 to Siloti. His pupils included Mark Blitzstein, Alexander Goldenweiser, Ilmari
Hannikainen, Constantine Igumnov, Alexander Kelberine and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Alexander Siloti did not make any commercially issued discs. He made two Liszt rolls
both of which are on CD. They are Hungarian Rhapsody no. 12 and Bénédiction de Dieu
dans la solitude.
SLUR
A ‘slur’ is a segment of a circle used in the notation of music. The slur originated in
violin music to indicate bowing although it later on occasions became longer to indicate a
legato that contained two or more necessary bow changes. In piano music a slur has two
separate functions. These are to indicate a legato touch and to indicate a musical phrase.
In piano music, whether the final note of a slur is, or is not, to be detached may be
problematical. The role of the sustaining pedal in all this, and whether the pedal may
support or ‘contradict’ a slur, may also be problematical. It is said that in Mozart the
pedal should never ‘contradict’ an articulated slur, that is a slur where the final note of
the slur is detached. This raises the question as to whether in any given case a slur is an
articulated slur.
Classical composers did not mark a staccato dot under the final note of a slur. Nor did
they connect two slurs over the one note. The practice of detaching the final note of a
two-note slur in piano music seems to have firmed somewhat into a rule in Beethoven’s
piano music. The second note of a two-note slur was and is always detached if followed
by one or more notes marked staccato.
Consecutively slurred Alberti basses in the piano music of classical composers indicate a
continuing legato touch, bearing in mind that early engravers preferred not to extend slurs
over the barline.
Editors of the piano works of Mozart and other classical composers often replaced the
original short slurs with longer slurs and/or the word ‘legato’ to indicate long phrases
and/or legato. Others went the other way and added staccato dots to the final notes of
short slurs.
It is said that in melodic phrases in Mozart and other classical composers, where there is
a sequence of two-note slurs over a minim and crotchet (or crotchet and quaver), there
should be no detachment of the crotchet (or quaver). In the first movement of Mozart’s
Sonata in B flat major K 570, there is, in one case, a sequence of three two-note slurs
over a minim and crotchet and in another, similar, case there is one slur over the six notes.
It could be argued that Mozart was indicating the same way of playing it in each case. It
could also be argued that Mozart was specifically drawing a distinction.
Some say that a two-note slur in Mozart and other classical composers should be
detached in violin and orchestral music (in addition to being detached in piano music).
This is not a view that is widely held but it has been put forward.