Lesson 60: Major Work Study, Part 4 — Performance and Recording

Play the complete Loeillet D minor sonata, all four movements, in a single sitting at target tempi.
Record yourself doing so, and listen to the recording without the score.
Build a focused list of what to fix on the next pass — not a long list, three items.

Lessons 57–59 — all four movements of the Loeillet sonata.
A way to record yourself (phone or dedicated recorder).

Whole-work performance assembly.
Self-recording as a third ear.
Focused three-item fix lists.

A piece is finished when the recording reveals nothing you didn't already know was there.

Lessons 57, 58, and 59 took the four movements of the Loeillet D minor sonata in detail. This lesson brings them together. There are no new musical ideas in this lesson — the work is in the assembly: playing four movements in a row, recording the result, and using the recording as a third ear.

The run-through

Set up the recording before you begin. Phone, dedicated recorder, whatever you have — put it five or six feet away, at head height, not on the music stand. Play the four movements in order, with the rests between them you would take in performance:

Largo → Allegro: Eight beats of silence. Long enough to reset the affect, short enough not to break the arc.
Allegro → Adagio: Twelve beats. The transition from Italian energy to French gravity needs space.
Adagio → Giga: Six beats. The Giga answers the Adagio the way the Allegro answered the Largo; the rest is short.

Do not stop and restart mid-movement. If something goes wrong, keep going. The recording is honest; perfection is for the next session.

Listening to the recording

Put the score away. Listen straight through, twice. The first listen is for the whole shape — do the four affects come across? Does the architecture sound like four movements of one sonata, or four separate exercises? The second listen is for trouble — mark anything that makes you flinch.

Three of the most useful questions to ask while listening:

Tempo: Did each movement breathe at the tempo you intended, or did some rush or drag? Compare your recording's bar count against a metronome.
Phrasing: Could a listener hear the bar lines as you wanted them — or were they smoothed away by even articulation, or hammered too hard by a tongue?
Affect: Are the Largo and the Adagio recognisably different from one another? Are the Allegro and the Giga?

The three-item fix list

Resist writing a long list. Pick three things to work on between now and the next run-through — the three that, if fixed, would change the whole recording. More than three becomes a backlog that never empties; fewer than three is denial.

Typical first-run-through fix lists:

The Largo's last cadence dragged — the flattement was too long.
The Allegro's sixteenth-note sequence in bar 2 still has a fingering hiccup at speed.
The Giga's slurring was inconsistent — some groups had it, some did not.

That is a real list. Work it, then run the recording again.

Memorisation

The upper-intermediate curriculum ends here. Before moving to the advanced track, take one more pass at the sonata's openings — the four motives memorised in Lesson 53 should still play from memory. If they have slipped, refresh them. The advanced track assumes you know what those gestures feel like without the page.

Now play these

Loeillet: Sonata in D minor, Op. 1 No. 1 — complete: The capstone of this arc. Record it twice over two weeks; compare the recordings.
Pepusch: Sonata in F major, Op. 1 No. 1: A second complete sonata to test the procedure. Same four-lesson plan: overview & first movement, slow movement, fast movements, performance & recording.

When you have recorded the complete Loeillet sonata, listened back without the score, and produced a three-item fix list — and the list is real, not aspirational — move on to Lesson 61, the start of the advanced track.