Picking Up the Pieces

I feel like an old dog who is having to learn a paw-ful of new tricks. After playing this Chopin piece on and off over the past 15 or so years, I'm realizing that some of my fingerings just don't work. Well, I realized it long ago, but I'm accepting it now. And I'm starting the long road of changing the fingerings that have been imprinted on my brain all this time. First, we have the octave-jump that appears a couple of times on the first page, and a couple of times at the end (sorry, I don't have measure numbers at hand): Do you see that "1 5" there? Basically, I use my 5 finger for the lower F, use 1 an octave up, and then do a quick switch from 1 to 5 while keeping the F pressed down. I can do this quite well at a slow tempo. When I speed up, however, I let up on the higher F just a bit, and I end up playing two short F's in succession--one with the 5, and one with the 1. It's always been like this. It's always been a toss-up as ...

We all have them--those weeks where you just can't seem to get to the piano to practice much more than the major/minor scales and arps. This week has been one of those weeks. I'd looked forward to practicing on Friday evening after work (which is my usual pattern), but something else came up--I can't remember what it was, but I remember calling my husband to see when he would be home, and complaining that I hadn't had a single chance to practice. And then Saturday was just busy, busy, busy. On Sunday, I had my first volunteer piano "gig" at a local assisted-living facility where I'll be playing every couple of weeks. I hadn't practiced in three days, and it felt like it had been three weeks. Still, it went pretty well, and everyone seemed to enjoy the music. It's a high-end facility and I was half-expecting a grand piano, or at least a nice upright, but it was a Yahama keyboard with non-weighted keys. So that took some adjustment. I've gotten...

It's time for me to address something I've never addressed. It's something I've thought about, but never too seriously. But I think I'm at a point where I need to think about it. I dance with I play. Call it channeling Stevie Wonder, but I sway and rock and move. Even worst, my body contorts a little bit, sometimes in ways that aren't all that attractive. When I see other classical pianists play this way, I find it distracting, and it sends out a (however unconscious) message that the performance is about the performer's emotional state, rather than about the music itself. It's an unconscious thing with me. I only know that I do it because I've been told, sometimes in painfully polite terms. Once, after playing my Bach C#-major prelude and fugue for a class, one of the visiting professors asked, "Do you suffer from back pain?" He went on to say that I looked uncomfortable when I played. No, I'd actually been extremely comfortable ...

It's been a while since I've listened to someone else besides myself playing the Schubert Impromptu, Op. 90, No. 2, so I watched/listened to a few YouTube videos this morning. I just wanted to remind myself of what this piece is supposed to sound like--the tempo, the phrasing, and particularly the ben marcato section. I'm never quite sure how much emphasis I should give to the triplets in the middle of each measure. Here are a some examples: So I watched, and listened. I won't share the videos here, but there are some interpretations--the ones that are more rubato, the ones that are played too fast or too loud throughout--that I'm not crazy about. Others--particularly the Horowitz--are the gold standard. Of course Horowitz is the gold standard. And his triplet sections sound ... simultaneously tossed-off and glittering, rumbling and sparkling. And they each sound a little different from the others; there is no single "sound," but a variety of them,...

Just thought I'd share this (sadly out-of-tune) recording of the Schubert Impromptu . I don't have it to the goal tempo there, and I won't for a while, as I'm working my way up very slowly. This recording has a few mess-ups, but not too many. My favorite part is that last 30 or so seconds.

Yesterday, Carol (my piano teacher) suggested that I begin learning a Beethoven sonata. YES! Twist my arm, Carol! I'd wanted to bring the same thing up to her, but I didn't want to be presumptuous. Beethoven sonatas are hard. Even the easy ones are hard. When I was in college, I played the first and second movements of Op. 10, No. 1 in C minor. The plan was to master the third movement (all three, actually) my senior year and play it, along with a few other pieces, for my senior recital. Alas, I had some health issues that year and ended up having to withdraw from my first-semester classes, and then I missed about three weeks of second semester, plus May Term. In the end, I barely had enough hours to graduate on time, much less play a planned senior recital of Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, and more. That was a bit of a digression, but it's all to say that I do have some experience, however miniscule, in the world of Beethoven sonatas. So now the question i...

Yesterday was my piano lesson. I played through the arpeggios--all of 'em!--to warm up. After that, we moved on to Bach, starting with the Prelude. I've been working on this thing for months, and I've had the notes down for some time now. It sounds pretty good to the untrained ear, and now I'm really in the fine-tuning phase, working to have everything perfectly balanced. The scales are sounding good, and those left-hand trouble spots are not causing nearly the trouble they did before. Oddly enough, my biggest problem now is the thirty-second notes in those first few measures. My left hand eighth notes are light and graceful, but my right hand thirty-second notes are uneven--not so much rhythmically as ... tonally? The second note will be too loud, or the third will be too soft, or ... they just sound punchy rather than smooth. One thing Carol said was to imaging this piece is being played by a single hand, and think of a single line of sound rather than ...

Once again, my failure to blog does not translate into a failure to practice. While I still have days where I don't play a single note, those days are few. Most days I'm managing to spend an hour or so at old Henry. On Sunday, I spent three. After that three-hour session, I decided that three hours of practice per day would be just about right. Alas, I cannot beam myself back to 1989 or 2004, when I actually had  that kind of time. So I practice when I can. I can now play all of my pieces—the prelude and fugue, the nocturne, and the impromptu—perfectly (at least when it comes to striking the right notes) ... at about half the tempo they're supposed to be. For the next few weeks, it will be a process of diligently playing these pieces over and over again at a certain notch on the metronome ... and then moving up a notch. And playing them ad nauseam at that notch ... and then, moving up another notch. Until I can play it at my goal tempo. It's going to be a slo...