Monica - I really liked your recordings! I really enjoy all of the Clementi Sonatinas, although it's been a long time since I've played them myself. Now you've made me want to dig up that book again.

I especially like the second movement. I noticed a few slight losses of momentum I suppose, but nothing that bothered me badly.

From an interpretive standpoint, your dynamics and phrasing made sense to me. I'm not an expert on the "proper" way to play these Sonatinas, but if it doesn't break any rules you may try a bit lighter touch from time to time as the dynamics allow. There are a few opportunities in both movements where I feel a delicate touch could work well. Just thinking out loud - if your interested for any reason, let me know and I can give my two cents on the bars where this could apply.

I can see the purist points Rainer is trying to make, but for me I also don't see this break thing as that big a deal. Don't read too much into individual comments - 99% of the time folks have good intentions if perhaps not so good tact.

Best Regards.

Thank you, Matthew. For sure we all have own special way of playing and no matter how another person plays something, he/she will rarely please Everybody in all aspects. No need for you to go into any more detail on this one. After I fix and upload my 'other' version, I will be one with these sonatinas. They are fun to play, though!

Oh my goodness, that remark clearly did not come across the way it was intended, so let me begin by apologizing for overstepping the boundaries of tact.
Let me be clear that I do not hate your recording, the H-word was just a figure of speech, and I'm sorry if it wasn't clear that it applied not to the recording but only to the edit in which you shortened one of the pauses.
OK, perhaps I'm being too purist on this issue, perhaps it is a molehill. But if you think of it as being a molehill on an otherwise virtually unblemished lawn, then you can see why I'm pleading for its removal.
You don't? Then I must have been unclear. I guess my previous criticism made you think I meant your pauses were too long. So when you agreed to compromise by shortening them (well, one of them), you were then understandably upset when I told you I wished you hadn't done that. You deserve a more in-depth explanation.

I didn't just mean that the pauses were "too long" in the sense that they would benefit from shortening a little. The nature of the purist position here is that there should just be no pauses at all, that the A section should join to the B section (and also back to itself on the repeat) in a seamless manner with no rhythmic hiatus whatsoever. You need some punctuation, for sure, but it should be achieved by some other way than inserting extra time. The only shortening of these pauses which would satisfy me would reduce their length to zero.

Basically I'm saying that any amount of pause here is bad. The transition ought to be playable without losing sync with a metronome. Putting in a pause lasting a whole beat (as you had before the edit), while still bad, at least has the slightly redeeming feature that you stay in sync with the metronome's beats (though of course you would get out with its bar-beats if you had a metronome which you can program to tick louder on the first beat of each bar). By shortening the pause to a fraction of a beat (you reduced it to about half a beat) you lose that redeeming feature and end up completely out of phase with the metronome. It was in this sense that I considered your edit to have made things worse.

Although in performance there is no real metronome, the listener's subconscious metronome synchronises itself with the music it hears. It's generally quite a tolerant metronome and can easily adapt to gradual fluctuations in tempo, and indeed this internal metronome is what notices, and helps the listener enjoy, rubati where appropriate. But it doesn't like phase jumps.

No doubt you still disagree with me, but I hope that at least clarifies what I mean.

I know what you mean now. And you're right, I don't agree. But that's okay....