Picking Up the Pieces: A Piano Practice Journal

This weekend, I realized it was time to make some changes to the fingering in Liszt. Here is a boring video of me talking about them. That's all it is. Just me talking. And here is a video where I play one of the sections with changes. Can you guess where the new fingering is?

Despite almost no time for practice last week, I managed to start writing in some fingering for the B-flat major fugue, starting at the end. At my piano lesson yesterday, I played through the last few measures. We talked a bit about the fingering, and she agreed that my LH fingering in measures 45 and 46 will work well. Here's measure 45: Bach said to use 3 and 2 for the C and E-flat, but I switched it to 2 and 1, which makes it easier for me to move from 5 to 3 in the bass. The thumb of my left hand just slides down from E-flat to D, and all is good. I am so excited about playing another fugue! The C#-major one was a bear (albeit one that I loved dearly), and this one has been a lot easier (so far) to pick up. For the most part, the fingering flows pretty smoothly; I've only come across a few weird/nonstandard fingerings ... like this move from 4 to 5 in the LH: Normally, you would go from 4 to 3 there, but the 3 is busy playing the B-flat above. I just lov...

Schubert has gotten the short shrift for a couple of days. Not that I'd planned it that way, of course. It's just that I'm at a place in the Schubert that isn't lending itself to micro-practices. I need time to work through a whole section. Plus, it's kind of hard. I focused on measures 230 to 238 today. It's where the familiar scale-y E-flat theme takes an interesting turn in the chromatic section (specifically, measure 232). I was having a little trouble with the fingering in the left hand (5 or 4? 5 or 4?) and was stumbling a little on the chromatic stuff. I played with the fingering in both hands and finally figured out my 5's and 4's in the LH. It's not that different from what I did with the Bach earlier today: arranging the fingering so to allow as little effort as possible for me. I also think I have a good fingering pattern worked out in the RH. Another challenge for today was switching from the chromatics to the downward F-mino...

I usually have a wide-open morning for practicing on Saturdays, but that hasn't been the case today, mainly because I was exhausted after a long, stressful week and slept in (a rare thing for me) this morning. But I did have time for some scales and Bach. At my lesson on Thursday, Carol said that I'm going to need to play more lightly if I ever want to get this prelude up to speed. I'm "punching" the keys and playing them with more weight than I need to. I think this is partly because I'm going at such a slow speed (♪=40). It's a plodding pace, and I'm tempted to plod and "punch." So today I practiced playing it more lightly, but with equal intensity, starting at ♪=40. My goal at this point—now that I have the notes and the fingering figured out—is to play it perfectly at this tempo. Once I can play it perfectly at ♪=40 (and by that, I mean that I can do it consistently, not just once), I'll move to ♪=42. I won't move to ♪=44 unti...