So, basically, I’ve been busy, the site has been neglected and now, for my own satisfaction, I have decided to start working towards piano exams again.
It may not be the easiest thing to organise.
Category: Uncategorized
Dreams and a new year
Some time before Christmas, this cropped up on my youtube recommendations.
We don’t get Pianist Magazine here and being somewhat concerned about moving, I tend not to go for postal subscriptions. But I figured I had a couple of trips to Ireland so if I got lucky, I’d pick up that magazine and if not, I’d do a one off online order for it. I liked that piece a lot. It seems I like certain waltzes as my queue of music to learn includes a Sib waltz and there is the ongoing behemoth Valse Fantaisie and I’ve got a transcription of the Masquerade Waltze by Khachaturian as well.
But I have no hope of actually learning any of these things without a bit more work.
2018 had some high points. I performed in public again for the first time in a few years; I played a few beautiful pianos, some more than once. I fell in love with a Steinway; I won’t ever be able to afford it. And I built this site with a view to working harder. Some of the work happened but not regularly, so objectives and goals were either not met, or were interrupted.
So for 2019, the overall objective is to get more work done, more technical improvements, and a couple of pieces finished or pushed forward. There are two big pieces I want to learn which are challenging and long term projects.
Hard pieces
- Ballade No 1 in G Minor – Chopin
- Valse Fantasie – Glinka/Gryaznov
Less hard pieces
- Valse Triste, Sibelius
- Sur Le Fil – Tiersen
- Valse d’Amelie – Tiersen
- Nocture in C#m – Chopin
- Christmas Tree – Ribokov
From a technique point of view, I have some Hanon and Czerny to work on. After that, no skillset issues – keep practising sight reading and relative pitch exercises and continue auxiliary reading.