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Monday, July 24

I worked all day, and poor piano couldn't be the priority. George only got 60 minutes today.

First, I worked on Suzuki. I do not like Suzuki. I find it boring and not very helpful. My piano teacher, on the other hand, loves Suzuki and swears that it's improving my technique. So I'm doing Suzuki ... even though it bores me to tears. It's like bad medicine that I have to take a couple of times each week before my next piano lesson. It only takes about fifteen minutes each time, but those are the longest fifteen minutes of my entire practice session.

After an interminable fifteen minutes, I moved on to scales. First, I played last night's challenge: B harmonic minor in contrary motion, four octaves at 80 on the metronome. Perfect! Just to make sure it wasn't a fluke, I played it through a few more times. Perfect!

Tonight's official scales were E-flat major and C minor. Both normally pose little problem for me, but just for fun I did the 9-8 thing for both. I hit snags and fixed them. When I finally did the play-through with the metronome, they were ... perfect!

Arpeggios were G major and E minor. No prob.

I spent tonight's practice session on the deceptively easy Measures 38 through 49 of the Liszt. I went ahead and memorized them with the correct fingering. With all of that handwiching, it's tempting to throw the fingering out the window and just grab at what you can. Not a good idea, so I drilled the fingering into my brain for a good half hour or more.

Only one measure proved a challenge for me: Measure 46, playing on the C dominant 7th chord. The handwiching gets really hairy in that section, and I kept changing my mind about the ideal fingering. One fingering made more sense but strained my LH a bit. The other one required the LH to jump more, but didn't strain it. Jumping isn't too much of a problem, since I'm both pedaling and playing the LH chords as a slight staccato. But jumping is risky business when you're in the midst of a handwich. I'll have to ask Deborah at my piano lesson what fingering she recommends.

Too tired to tackle Bach tonight. Disheartening. I have to stop this alternating thing, where I work on one piece one day and the other piece the next. I retain everything better if I meet with it all once a day. I played through the fugue (the sections I've worked on HT) once and then called it a night.

Comments

Waterfall said…
Karen, I started to answer your question in the comments, but ended up devoting a whole post to it ... see above!
8:48 AM
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