By Phoebe C
Students need pieces fit for their level of playing. You can’t be playing a beginner piece (like in an early Suzuki book) when you should be playing a more advanced piece, and vice versa. Playing a piece in your level can help with your technique and can also help you to graduate from a lower level to a higher one. To be an intermediate student, you need to be able to do the following: play in different positions on the violin, be able to understand and execute more complex rhythms, bowings, and vibrato. Here are three violin pieces for an intermediate student.
The first piece we would like to list for an intermediate student is: Accolay Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor. In this excellent piece you need to apply various skills including the following: challenging rhythms, intonation in many different positions, memorization of a long work consisting of several pages and shifting through many positions. The range of rhythms in this piece encompasses quarter notes, half notes, whole notes, triplets, and sixteenth notes. You need to know how to read all these different rhythms and be able to execute them well. The positions you need to play in stretches from first position to seventh position. Going from low to high register on the violin, you need to make sure that your intonation is accurate. One of the most important aspects in playing the violin, and certainly in this piece, is to make sure the notes are correctly in tune; if they are not, it makes the piece sound amiss. Memorization is also very important. When you play with the sheet music in front of you, you have less freedom as you need to be looking at the music. When you take the sheet music out of your way, you have more freedom as you can move around and play the piece with more passion.
The second piece that we would like to mention for an intermediate student is: Mozart Violin Concerto No. 3 in G major. This is an intermediate-advanced piece. In this piece you need to play even more complex rhythms, go very high on the fingerboard, and play with a lot of power and conviction. Also, you need the skill to play spiccato notes. This piece requires a lot of practicing, especially for intonation. Since the piece goes up and down the fingerboard, having the notes in tune makes the piece sound more sophisticated. In this concerto you need to play Allegro at a brisk tempo, and Adagio at a slow tempo.
The third and final piece that we would like to talk about is: Czardas by Vittorio Monti. This piece requires much practicing and dedication. In this piece, you need to do: glissandos, very fast passages, vibrato, and harmonics. If we were to compare this to a piece from an early Suzuki book, we can tell that Czardas is much more advanced. In the early Suzuki book, you stay in first position all the time, you don’t do vibrato, and the rhythm and bowings are not hard either. Now, if we were to compare Czardas to a very high-level piece, the Mendelssohn Concerto, we can tell that the Mendelssohn concerto is much more advanced for several reasons. The first movement of the Mendelssohn Concerto consists of several long passages, while Czardas only has a few. The cadenza in the Mendelssohn Concerto is very long. When you compare memorizing the pieces, it’s harder to memorize the Mendelssohn because of its length. The rhythms, bowings, and shifting positions are much more advanced than they are in Czardas.
We hope that you enjoy playing and working to continually improving these pieces, after all playing music should be less about the work and effort and more about the fun and enjoyment that it brings into your life.
