Follets – Alphonse Hasselmans

[Mel Sandberg]

I hope somebody can help me.

[Tacye]

Do you have the Lily Laskine recording?

[carl-swanson]

This piece is an etude, and the technical point it is teaching is the bisbigliando effect. It forces you to touch the strings at the moment you play them and not a nanosecond earlier. This means that, at a very high rate of speed, you have to place just one note at a time ahead of the one you are playing so that the string can ring as long as possible and so you don’t hear any muffle. Watch Mildred Dilling on youtube. She does it expertly.

I would try a couple of things to try to get the technique down. You don’t have to practice the whole piece while you are working out the technique. Just work on one or two lines. When you have those working properly the rest of the piece will be there. First, play the three note arpeggios in each hand as chords, and practice placing and playing the chord in one movement, not two. Your fingers should touch the string ONLY at the moment you play the strings. Practice that slowly, maybe even hands separately, then together slowly until you can play the chords very fast with both hands and you are not muffling anything.

Secondly, play the arpeggios as written, with both hands, very slowly and focusing entirely on placing one finger at a time ahead of the one being played. When done correctly, you should not hear any muffling or accents or unevenness. Slowly speed it up keeping that one-finger-at-a-time placing.

Hasselmans indicates the melody notes with double stems. But the success of the piece depends mostly on an effortless, accentless hum of harmony from the fast even arpeggios, and also the changes in dynamics he has indicated.

[Mel Sandberg]

Thanks for valuable advice.

[barbara-brundage]

>Hasselmans indicates the melody notes with double stems.

These are not in the Annie Louise David edition, FWIW.

[unknown-user]

My teacher’s teacher’s teacher was Alphonse Hasselmans himself.

[unknown-user]

Please forgive my spelling- it is of course, the wonderful Luciano Pavarotti.

[Mel Sandberg]

Thanks for your insightful explanations Ivan.

[barbara-brundage]

>means little flames

It means what is called in English a ‘will-o’-the-wisp.” Look that up, because if you understand that, you will understand the piece.

[barbara-brundage]

ignis fatuus is the same thing

[Mel Sandberg]

For everybody who helped, thanks a lot.

[Tacye]

It was on the ABRSM Grade 6 C list of the previous syllabus, which I think was active until 2004.

[Mel Sandberg]

Thanks Tacye, I thought it might be +/- Gr 6-ish…., although I could happily put it into Grade 7.

[Mel Sandberg]

Further to my previous post, if anybody cares to read my post about Bisbigliando in Professional Harpists – I can confirm that changing the bisbigliando to my suggestion (there), transforms this piece into something that my family didn’t even recognise.

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