Uncategorized – Concerto in C Minor

Store visits – Steinway in Hamburg

Factory visits are not generally easy but Steinway and Sons have a nice flagship store near the factory and if you are interested in their pianos, it is worth a trek out. One of their technicians was voicing a Steinway D while I was there so I did not get to play much while I was there (although I did touch a Boston for pretty much the first time that I think).

How did I get out there? Number 3 Bus and number 180 buses. The 180 was not 100% reliable that day but this is hardly Steinway’s fault.

I did get to see a Noa in blue. It was a B, and it was gorgeous to look at. Someone had already reserved it. I envied these unknowns.

The most beautiful piano to look at was one of the Crown Jewels in Olive – I’m sorry I did not have an opportunity to play that but it was truly beautiful to look at.

In the recital room, there were three Concert Ds, and at least one was fitted with Spirio. I have always had some rather mixed feelings about the idea of player pianos but in a discussion with the technician and the store manager, I’m increasingly sold on it. The technician, whose name has escaped me now, pointed out that they can now stream live concerts from a concert hall to a Spirio R equipped piano and had done it for Vikingur Olafsson’s trip to the Elbphilharmonie. I could fantasize about a winter evening sitting in my living room having a concert by one of the best concert pianists in the world streamed to my piano with the sound benefits that go there. Although I’d love to see how they replicate Daniil Trifonov’s touch.

Steinway also had a pop up shop in Alsthaus, the main department store in central Hamburg. I believe it ends end of September 2024. Claudia recommended that I go and have a look at the Sunburst upright there because it had a particularly nice sound. So I did.

They were also running weekend concerts there, and the morning after that concert, I went and had a look at the Steinway B that was in the pop up shop and I did play both it and the Sunburst. There are radical differences between the grand and upright Steinways – the uprights are slightly heavier to play – but it’s interesting to do it. I might aspire to a Steinway B at some point in my life but my journey has, afterall, started with a digital Kawai CA59.

One thing I do have to reiterate is that I spoke to several Steinway staff between both the Flagship and the Pop-Up. Steinway’s staff are unfailingly polite, very open and welcoming. In particular (despite not remembering his name), I would like to underline the very interesting and broad conversation I had with Steinway’s technician (who was voicing the D when I arrived) which covered the need to be not so conservative, views on several top concert pianists, the recognition of how some pianists make you want to play more (Olafsson in particular here).

I’m always honest to say I am not buying today but I’ve found that many Steinway sales staff put the time. Unfailingly they know what they are talking about and I have never met any who do not play themselves. They understand.

20240824 Practice Diary

It’s been a while since I’ve been practising, sadly. When I got to Hamburg I had not played in about 3 weeks. But I am getting back there this week and what am I working on.

Liszt Consolation Number 2. This is a gorgeous piece of Accessible Liszt for which the left hand starts on a half between the first and second beat. It’s not a polyrhythm but I am finding it a bit counter intuitive. There are moments it comes right for me and I think god, how can I create something so beautiful, and then there are moments it does not.

Rameau Les Cyclopes. I love this and the first page of it is mostly a joy to work with. It’s not listenable (sorry to my Tonic stream audience) as a performance yet as there is a pesky arpeggio in it which must surely have been easier on a harpsichord. So this is very much the subject of slow practice and I need to start putting time in on metronome practice with arpeggios in general.

Repertoire: I keep practising three of the pieces I did for Grade 6 as they are appropriate for, inter alia, playing Steinways in piano stores. Those pieces were by Mendelssohn, Rebikov and CPE Bach. CPE Bach does not work most mornings for some reason and yet it’s the one I use to warm up mostly.

Sight reading: this week I took two pieces from the issue of Pianist sitting on my piano (well one of them =- I have two). It’s the August-September Edition and the two pieces were:

Aria by Antonio Fragoso. He was a young composer when he died – 1897 to 1918 so this is basically late Romanticish. It’s a pretty piece in Gminor which makes extensive use of the sustain pedal. Worth a look if you are looking for sightreading practice. Pianist marked it Intermediate
Eastern Promise by Melanie Spanswick. This is in A Minor with one or two rhythm tests in it for all that it is a short piece. Again, good sightreading practice if this is a weak point you are trying to fix.

Neither of these pieces are on my 40 pieces challange which has pretty much fallen apart. With 4 months left in the year, I will need to scale that done and reassess how I manage it as a project for next year (or I could star the project a new this week which which case I am 5% in. I will reflect on that the next time I am staring out the window of a bus. At some point, I need to write a bit on sight reading, how I feel about it, and what I want to be able to do.

I did no scales this week. I am a very bad person.

Recording the Grade 6 video

The Facebook group for ABRSM exams is full of people squealing about how easy the performance grades are. I wonder how many of them have done one. I’ve spent almost two weeks trying to get an acceptable recording for that exam. Amongst the challenges

My fingers which can only play CPE Bach when literally no one is looking. They are not fooled by cameras.
My brain which decided at one point that I had never before actually heard Indigo Moon by Elissa Milne despite having played it daily for four omnths
The not very nice people who race motorbikes up and down the avenue on which I live. I have triple glazed windows.
The helicopter flying near the building on Tuesday night.
The not very sober people on the beer cycle today yowling Sweet Caroline to me and my ill fortuned neighbours.
My brain which decided that Autumn Leaves no 3 too was alien to it several times this week.

The mighty teaching fraternity includes some who say that this is no problem if the piece is secure for you. 3 of these pieces were ultra secure for me except – and this is critical – when the camera was running. Then it was anyone’s guess where I would end up. I’ve played some great jazz chords this week. I didn’t plan to.

Anyway, it’s submitted. It’s not perfect but then perfection does not exist.

Recent sheet music acquisitions

I found a new sheet music shop in Antwerp last week and while I still don’t have Liszt’s Chorales, or Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphony number 7, I have some new stuff from there, and from Stretta online. I also added to my Henle library app.

On the latter, I added Consolation No 2 by Liszt which I will be starting soon as it is now on my Grade 8 syllabus. I have another edition of it which I will do a compare (mostly the book is gateway Liszt so I want to ensure it hasn’t been dumbed down in any way).

From Stretta, I picked up Early Morning in Istanbul by Fazil Say. I love his music and that has been on my list for a while.

From the bricks and mortar shop, I acquired the Rachmaninoff Moments Musicaux, the Henle edition because I dislike trying to read the Boosey edition. I also picked up some Slavonic dances by Dvorak (and now that I think of it, possibly one of his Humoresques went onto the Henle app as well). The Izmir Suite by Fazil Say arrived into my possession too – I wasn’t familiar with that particular piece and how bad could it possibly be? There are two pieces from it knocking on my ARSM repertoire list. We will see how it goes./

I also picked up the Liszt transcriptions of Schubert songs. I got that because Erlkonig is in it and I am a glutton for punishment. LAstly I picked the Barenreiter Edition of Pavane by Fauré which means I now have two different piano versions of this. Per the notes of the editor, a lot of different transcriptions of this are knocking around. Hmmm.

Releases of Note: Lucas Debargue, Complete Piano Music of Gabriel Fauré

I realised I hadn’t flagged this when I was writing about more recent sheet music acquisitions. This is out and for me, it is an unexpected piece of joy. Gabriel Fauré’s solo piano music is a little undervalued I feel. The piece of music which I truly love is the B section from this.

Lucas Debargue plays Fauré

I haven’t come across many stand out solo albums this year – the top two albums of the year so far are duets.

This is, however, wonderful, and deserves a lot of recognition.

Exchanging Bachs

I’m tired of Bach’s two part invention in E major. It’s not coming right for me; it’s lagging far beyond the other three pieces that I am doing for the Grade 6 ABRSM and the more I work on it, the more dispirited I feel.

The other pieces were relatively quick to learn under finger so I wondered if I might do better with a different piece. I didn’t remember wanting to do much of List A for the Grade 6 when I looked so I wasn’t totally enthusiastic. But that was almost one year ago and I’ve happened across more music in the meantime. So at some point since then, I had bought CPE Bach’s Solfeggio and added it to the to be learned list.

Is it a good idea to skip on the two part invention? Do I really want to admit to a piece of music besting me? It’s Bach – it’s supposed to be a challenge.

But there’s the question of keeping focused on the objective and the objective was not actually Bach; that was just a contribution. Something else could contribute – it wasn’t the only piece on the syllabus.

So I went and looked to see what else was on the syllabus and I idly considered some Schubert before I noticed the CPE Bach and thought, wait, don’t have I have that piece now in the the sheet music collection? I’m sure I bought it in Trier….

The effort on the JS Bach is almost certainly not wasted. It feeds through into improvements in other piano skills. The read through of the CPE Bach was joyfully straightforward. My sight reading. It’s not necessarily a difficult piece to read although it’s a bit finicky to play with the hand switching, and also, the fact that it is played at Prestissimo. But it feeds into the Rameau that I want to do next year so there is that.

This decision will probably cost me a month (not superb but still) but I’m also a lot happier to move away from a piece that was making me unhappy. And this variety of syllabus was why I chose the ABRSM rather than the RIAM when I picked back up the piano exams.

Christmas piano bar and projects

A couple of social media things over Christmas to note: Sebastian Dupuis is working his way through Liszt solo piano albums on YouTube, it’s very enjoyable and watching him play is always a pleasure.

Gavan Reilly, one of the leading political journalists in Ireland, took an hour out of his family Christmas to sit and play internet piano bar from requests sent in via Instagram while he was streaming. It’s an interesting idea. It demonstrated the extent to which I don’t know pop culture (I know very few tv themes, for example). But he put out a fair few tunes and raised over 3000 euro for charity. He did it by ear as well, so fair play to Gav for that.

I will add links for both later.

Piano Magazines

I’m kind of fascinated by piano magazines. I regularly pick up Pianist if I can, and here in Belgium, Pianiste (in French) turns up every once in a while. I’m keeping an eye out for something in Dutch. However, a couple of weeks ago I picked up two German magazines and they differed from the French and English publications in one very critical way and that was the lack of sheet music. Neither German magazine provided scores.

In itself, this is not such a bad thing (although there tends to be a really nice choice of music and guidance for same in the French and English magazines) but it was unusual. On the other hand, Germany seems to have a lot of sheet music shops and there is always IMSLP.

One of the articles which caught my eye in one of them was an article on the place of the piano in the life and writing of Jane Austen. For me that was interesting: it mentioned that [like me] she played a lot of Scottish and Irish dance melodies, gave an overview of where the piano cropped up in the novels. Of course, having more or less learned Pride & Prejudice by heart, you cannot fail to see the place of the piano in the society of that book, on several levels, Lizzie Bennett’s tendency not to practice, her sister Mary’s desperation to practice and show off, and of course, the piano bought by Mr Darcy for his sister. But equally, in the Emma, there is the question of the piano delivered to Jane Fairfax. Writing of that nature is not something I happen across very often. Very much more tends to be on current pianists and repertoire, so some essays on the place of piano in society is really interesting.

The other highlight was the vast number of release reviews which, where possible, includes the model of the chosen piano. I’ll do a piece of data analysis on that later.

I’m interested in any more piano magazines in EN, FR, DE, NL or ES, all of which I have a fighting chance of reading.

100daysofPractice

One of my main concerns about coming back to the world of exams is practice. I don’t do enough.
I am not sure what enough is, but I have a full time job and family commitments. For a long while, the piano was below getting anything like mindless rest.
What I am finding now, is that I can get occasional 20 minute sets in and occasional hours. I am struggling to do it consistently and as I am definitely working on 4 pieces and occasionally sniffing at a few others, this isn’t going to get me very far.
Enter 100 Days of Practice for which I have set up an Instagram. What I have learned from that exercise is that kind of accountability is a hassle. But fine. It’s done. I have Andante tracking time, and I signed up for Tonic as well. Objective there is not to get too hung up on other people listening to me.
Today, I crossed a major frontier with Indigo Moon, one of the Grade 6 pieces. I can play it, however badly, all the way through. We are now no longer chipping away at bits of it but we have the rough sandpaper out. Not ready for final polishing, a lot closer there than it was yesterday.
This is basically following two big practice sessions, of about 45 minutes each. It basically confirms my view that 20 minutes practice a day isn’t close to being enough.
So, accountability is the name of my game. You will find my practice account at @wnbplayspiano.

Current projects

I decided a couple of months ago that I had not really achieved anything very much for me personally; don’t get me wrong, I did some amazing stuff professionally, but personally, I was not feeling super great about myself. So, I started looking at things I had wanted to achieve when I was about 12 years old (a long time ago now) and whether they were truly gone, or whether there was still a chance. The figure skating gold medal is a non runner.

The children’s book, could yet happen.

And then there were the piano exams.

I stopped at Grade 5 at a time when Grade 8 was the ultimate pinnacle of piano playing. I’d done the exams with the Royal Irish Academy of Music local centre set up and it’s fair to say, I didn’t totally enjoy the experience. I still have some of the repertoire books at home, possibly grades 3, 4 and 5. Fur Elise turned up for one of them which was a relief, and Sonata in C major, K545 Mozart. But I was traumatised by pieces by Bartok and Kabelevsky at times. The Kabelevsky, I have totally blocked out of my mind and I found the Bartok on YouTube once. To be frank, I didn’t find the repertoire engaged me very much although my mother liked a little Sonatina in G written by someone whose name I can’t remember. The point is, the repertoire offered to children needs to keep them engaged with the repertoire. On this, the RIAM’s exam options in the 1980s failed with me. This is a pity.

But now I’m fifty and I want to see if things have changed. Also, I am on r/piano on Reddit and they don’t talk about RIAM much, and anyway googling it failed to give me access to the current grade repertoires. I got to five so I would have been interested in 6. I found something called the RCM which had huge lists as options for each grade, and I got very excited until I realised they are based in Canada. So I looked for the UK based academies and landed on ABRSM, the Associated Boards of the Royal Schools of Music. Interestingly, they had more or less just introduced performance diplomas which you record and upload to their exam site, and they had interesting repertoire. You did three pieces from assigned repertoire and chose a fourth yourself. In this way you could avoid the less attractive sight reading and aural tests. So I got planning.

If I wanted to do the diplomas, I had to pass Grade 8, and if I wanted to do Grade 8, I needed to pass Grade 5 Of Some Description. It’s possible that the Grade 5 I passed about 35 years ago with RIAM might be adequate but that involved some soul searching and archive searching on my part. I decided that it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to do the Grade 5 theory and went about checking how far behind that I was. Around a grade, it turned out. And then I found music on the Grade 6 list that I either had lined up to learn anyway, I figured I was a bit shy of Grade 8 for a while anyway so it would be no bad thing to do Grade 6 and then review whether to go straight to Grade 8 or give Grade 7 a shot. Or, even, abandon the whole shooting gallery. So I’ve been studying Grade 5 theory; I’m confident of passing it now but naturally, my ambitions have increased and now I want an distinction. I also know what my two main weaknesses are. So I’ll write a piece on preparing that separately.

For Grade 6, I’ve chosen the following pieces:

Invention no 6 by Bach
Venetian Gondola Song no 6 19b by Mendelssohn
Indigo Moon by Elissa Milne
Feuilles d’automne, no 3 by Vladimir Rebikov.

The first three come from the syllabus lists for Grade 6 which you will find here, and the Rebikov is the self chosen piece because I realised that Reverie by Debussy was probably more suitable for the Grade 8 exam. One of the objectives here is to span a reasonable amount of time in musical history and I think I achieved that.

So at the moment, I’m focusing on the Grade 5 theory for most of my effort with almost daily practice littered across the four performance pieces. The Mendelssohn has cropped in a monthly playing challenge so I will probably prioritise that for the month of June and see if I can finish that at least. I like it a lot, and then I’ve made a lot of progress on the Milne. Less happy, but also, less time devoted to it are the Bach and Rebikov. I hope to record the exam session for that in February 2024. After that, the current plan, pending time and organisation, are

Grade 8 (partially planned)
ARSM (partially planned)
LRSM (repertoire planned)
FRSM (repertoire planned)

We will see how it goes, I guess.