composers – Concerto in C Minor

20241006 Practice Diary

I’m on a 35 day streak for piano practice. Some of those practice sessions have been short – Thursday’s was 5 whole minutes. Nevertheless, it’s been good.

It’s my longest daily practice schedule since I turned my attention back to playing the piano about 18 months ago. I’m happy. I’m up to the Ruby Level on Tonic and I don’t see any blocking points between here and 3 November so fingers crossed that I make 50 days soon. After that, November and December will be challenging.

This week, no sight reading to report – I need to sort out my piano magazines and ensure I have consistent access to them. The main new sight reading I did was for the pieces I am preparing which is sort of okay but not quite what I want for sight reading practice. Most recently, Ballade No 1 which I started last week.

For the main four exam pieces there was progress on all of them, not enough in two cases, but a better than zero effort.

Rameau. I can play all of this through, not exactly error free and it’s currently at a slow enough speed that it takes a good chunk of practice time. Of the four pieces, it is the longest in terms of music to be played but it is also the piece I am closest to performance ready with. I have not memorised all of it; there is a section of page 4 left to internalise, and that section was proving very slow to read last week, can now be played at a speed that is consistent with most of ther rest of it. I’m working on speeding up the opening A section and the number of errors I am making there is dropping radically. I’m playing it a lot more consistently. I continue to have some issues with leaps and stretches through the end of page 1, good lot of page 2. But again, far better than last week. It is entirely possible that by the time I have to do this exam, I will hate this piece for the simple reason it has come on so much faster than the others

Debussy: opening section is coming along nicely. I love some of the sound textures, wish my fingers would behave more efficiently. I’m well into page two; there is one stretch that I don’t much like and it is impacting on my certainty about being able to play it smoothly for a while yet. It’s going to come in handy for similar issues in the Liszt piece which I’ll discuss below. Most of page 1 is memorised, not yet quite enough for me not to need to read it. For the future, I suspect the Henle layout is better than the Editions Peters layout.

Some of the sounds in the Debussy remind me of bells; and I suppose that’s reasonable if you are in an armchair in a country village with a church nearby in bucolic France; I’ve no idea whether he did that but it’s the impression it builds within me. Assuming no major accidents, I think this might be done before Christmas or early in the new year. I may have to find public concerts to play it and the Rameau at.

Liszt: This is slow going. I’m not sure why – I think part of it is the rhythmic structure; part of it are the moves of the lefthand around the keyboard. I’m not going to say I’m struggling with it but it is not making as much progress as I would like. It’s not consistent. It’s easier to read than the Debussy but harder to learn. It’s a three page piece and from what I can see, not as many repeats, if any, as JP Rameau has gifted me. I need to set down and seriously think about how to approach this. What I will say is that the chunk of regular playing has expanded but I am still very much confined to page 1 and will relisten and chop it up with a view to starting some other parts of the piece in parallel so that eventually, once I have the start mastered, I will have a lot of the rest of it done. I read through some of page 2 during the week; it’s more interesting but it includes a section which is highly counter intuitive for me; that is the section where the melody comes out through the left hand. This, in one way, is a key reason why I want to learn the piece. It gives me challenges and will provide me with input for the next section.

Rachmaninoff: this is really slow going and I suspect this is the piece that will delay the entire endeavour. On paper, it’s straightforward. I’m not going to say I am a fan of the triplets but for the most part, they aren’t enforcing (yet) any disturbing polyrhythms. But I consistently get them wrong. Mathematically they are fine; aurally I am fighting with them. I love Rachmaninoff so I am not in a mood for giving up on this and replacing it with either Tchaikovsky or Chopin. I could do June by Tchaik as a self selection (I don’t really like the option of January which is on the syllabus for 2025-26. So I am taking this quite slowly and assuming that at some stage, this will start to slide into place.

I did not touch Chopin 17/4 this week so no news on that.

Outside the syllabus, Chopin Ballade No 1. I have no idea what this sounds like to an outsider, and I am at the very beginning of a really long journey here but I love this so much. My initial target is to deal with the first two or so minutes but there are a few challenges to go with this on page 2. We will see.

20240929 Practice log

Another week has passed, I’m up a level in the practice gamification on Tonic. I’m not sure I am in the best frame of mind to be writing this.

Anyway, in summary I am making slow and painful progress and I am spending a lot of time on the piano. I feel like I should be getting more return on my time investment but i am not, so there.

a) Rameau. I can now, with some difficulty, play it through in 9 minutes. This is twice as long (at least) as I should be able to play it. But I am making progress, and three quarters of it is memorised, and the last page is coming together. I am not sure when it will be done but technically it’s at polish level, it just needs a manic amount of polishing.

b) Debussy. I made progress on this. Page 1 is almost memorised, and it’s reading quickly. I’ve moved forward with it to I dunny, around 20% of page 2. The piece is printed on 5 pages for the Editions Peter edition, a little less on my Henle app. Plus point about the Peters print is that the paper is not bright white. But that being said, the Henle layout which is slightly denser, is also otherwise much easier to read. I must have a look at the app to see if I can adjust the page colour.

c) Rachmaninoff. I made some progress on this. Not a lot because I am struggling with reading the rhythm (yo, all those triplets). But it’s further on than it was last week which is the least I can always hope for.

d) Liszt. I am not totally happy with this although I am doing more of it. I’m not happy with how page 1 is coming along – some of it is beautiful, some of it is beautiful, the two beautiful bits played together are an infuriating shipwreck and I’m very frustrated with that. I have started into parts of page 2, the harder parts are actually easier to play, the easier parts are not easier to play. I am hoping that progress there will eventually see the whole piece knit together.

e) Chopin 17/4. Oh yeah, you did not know about this. In fact, because I’m deepl frustrated with the romantic pieces this time round, and because I had set aside a decent amount of time to do this, I decided to add this Chopin piece to the mix and when the time comes, select two of the three to play for list B and List D. It seems (so far) more accessible than the Liszt. I’m not qualified to compare to the Rachmaninoff to be honest – the construction is so different between the later Romantic and the earlier stars, as it were. I like some of the chords in this though and I will see how it goes

f) Ballade No 1, Chopin. I want to pick up some of the opening structure of this and it’s somewhat readable (more than the Liszt COnsolation No 2 that I’m struggling with at the moment). So I touch this from time to time.

Practice wise, I come home from work, I eat, and I do some bits and pieces around the house and then I practice for between 60 and 90 Minutes. Today so far it was a little over two hours. I started with Reverie because I find the Rameau is too engaging and the other pieces are getting little attention. They all need more attention.

I’m reasonably certain I can bring these pieces up to performance level for the simple reason that while I cannot see progress on a daily basis, I can see it on a weekly basis. What troubles me is that I have scheduled lack of practice time coming up for most of November and December. I just cannot avoid it. My workload is about to increase at work too. So while rationally I can do this, the truth is, today at least I miss a lot of the feeling good about it. I’m not very happy about this and I feel difficult inside. I do still play repertoire because I want to retain three of the 4 Grade 6 pieces I did – they are nice, people like them and most of them time, they aren’t a total car crash.

We will see.

20240922 Practice Diary

It’s sobering to think that we are almost at the end of September. We’re passing the midpoint where the days are longer than the nights and soon, winter will be here. It’s well dark by the time half past eight rolls around in the evening. In Brussels, however, we have a little more warmth than we could have expected; it’s been 24 degrees most days this last week.

But I have been practising. Not so much sight reading because I haven’t pieces set up to be reading. If I ever have time to do this, I’d like to put together a sequence of pieces that you can find in IMSLP, create a giant pdf of all those pieces and share it as a sight reading resource. So, no major updates. No new Felix Le Couppey, for example. It’s a pity but I have a new copy of PIaniste at least so there should be some material there for me to take a look at in the coming few days.

So, on to what I’ve been doing this week which is mostly, Les Cyclopes by Jean-Philippe Rameau. There is something quite compelling about practising this (let’s not call what I inflict on the piece anything as positive as “playing it”. In summary this is:

50% memorised
100% read-through
End to End playable
with a lot of errors.

This piece has some interesting challenges, namely some leaps that I am sure are much much easier on the harpsichord than on the piano. There is also some what I call syncopation but probably has a different technical term somewhere along the line. These have been the biggest challenges. For the second lot of syncopation, I have given this many hours of my life. I will die early because of this but I can only say it would make the other two rounds easier (which it did). This piece, these few bars, when I get them right, it is a source of complete shock to me, so much so that it knocks me out of kilter for the oncoming express train of left hand leaps. I find them infuriating because they are not hard as such; they are harmonically logical, I listen to 8 different recordings of this and they are all in my ear, But my brain glitches. On this YouTube short you can see a lot of evidence of the errors and the glitches.

Opening part of Les Cyclopes, JP Rameau as murdered by Treasa

The thing is, I didn’t expect to be at this stage with any of the four pieces by now. In particular, given that I had such a complete failure with a Bach invention last year (but not with his son’s Solfeggio), I expected this to take me until about March next year. But I expect to be polishing this sooner rather than later provided I miss no practice for the next six weeks (I will lose half of November and most of December so I will have delays anyway).

That being said; listening to the recording has been helpful; it feels a lot faster playing it than it sounds when I listen back. I’m also not happy with the expression but there, I don’t have a lot of guidance. The pieces, originally written for harpsichord have no dynamic markings but the low Ds are eventually quite marcato courtesy of the need to jump well over an octave angling upwards. I’m not alone on this – you can listen to almost any recording of the piece on piano except maybe Grigory Sokolov.

The recordings vary in length from 2 minutes forty five to over four minutes which indicates there’s a wide variation in thinking around the pace of the piece. I don’t see the need to aim for the fastest rendition of it – I’m not sure I could cleanly get all of the scaled or arpeggiated sections, the later of which turn up 2 via the repeats as do the scales which are somewhat faster again. When I play this I want it to be crisp and clean. Close observers will acknowledge there’s quite a bit of work to be done on that front at least. I also want to see about playing this on an acoustic piano soon just to get a feel for avoiding mud. I play this without pedals and I haven’t seen any reason to change that yet. Need really to memorise it though because frankly, the page turns are killing me.

I’ve been practising up to 2 hours days this week and that’s mostly been the Cyclopes so for the other pieces, there isn’t a whole pile to report. I don’t have stats to back this up but I think the piece that got most attention beside Rameau was Reverie by Claude Debussy. I only started it last week so really very early stages here. I’m struggling to memorise it but find it remarkably easy to read (so far at least). The Edition Peters issue which I am learning from has 5 pages and let’s say I’m about 20% of the way through that for play through. The page turn from 1 to 2 isn’t really all that pleasant tbh so I’m going to take a look at the Henle edition of it which I think is on my iPad (if not, it will be very shortly after the iPad is charged).

For the Rachmaninoff and the Liszt, they have not received a lot of attention; neither got played at all today but get at least touched. For the Liszt, I am not very happy with how I play some of page one – it’s not the fireworksist fireworks that Franz has been able to offer the discerning and uniquely talented with more time to practise than I, but it has its challenges in terms of ensuring a legato sound (I feel that Claude has some unpleasant surprises in store here too) and I’d like to smooth those transitions over. Even the pedal isn’t able to hide the lack of cantabile which afflicts me here. If I’ve feeling brave, I may record/publish some of those efforts next week, but only if I am feeling brave and can drag myself away from JP Rameau, mercurial 18th century love of my life at the moment.

For Rachmaninoff, the approach here is very much more slow because as is his wont, it’s in D flat which is totally not my favourite key in the whole world. My target is to get the first 8 bars under control sometime soon, again, I will need to cheat on JP Rameau to do that but since I want to be able to submit an exam sometime next year, it’s going to have to be done.

In the background, I continue to play Mendelssohn 19b/6 and SPE Bach Solfeggietto regularly with the occasional visit to Rebikov, all of which I would like to keep in my repertoire. It’s not consistently successful but I do find it good to finish off a practice session with one of the three of them so that I can finish on a reasonably high note as opposed to misery caused by mercurial French composers down the years.

What I will do on my holidays…

I bought some sheets by Fazil Say lately. I’m taking a couple of weeks’ break from my ABRSM schedule as I have some travelling to do during that time as well.

So I have decided for now to start learning this

Brahms in Izmir by Fazil Say

It is really pretty and although it’s not getting hours of my time, it is very lovely to play even in learning mode.

Cool keyboard music that is not piano

Maestoso from Symphony no 3 “Organ” by Camille Saint Saens.

As it occurs to me:

Saints-Saens conducts, plays and speaks

I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Rachmaninoff’s recordings and feel very lucky to have them. Saint-Saens died over 100 years ago and to be frank, this is not bad at all in terms of quality. It includes bits of Concerto 2, Concerto 5 and the Africa Fantasy (I really should look for the piano music of that).

There is, incidentally, a recording of Brahms knocking around as well which was done in 1889. I find it almost impossible to listen to from a music point of view – the sound quality is very evidently early. You’ll find it on YouTube. I went looking for the Saint-Saens because someone mentioned he was a very good pianist in his day. The recordings date from 1904, just 15 years after the Brahms recordings and they are a significant jump in quality.

Piano transcriptions

Ben Laude’s piano channel is absolutely worth your time. He is a loss to ToneBase’s piano channel in general. Anyway, he posted this lately:

Top ten Mind-Blowing Piano Transcriptions – Ben Laude on YouTube

I really got back into buying sheet music when I came across some of the piano transcriptions done by Vyacheslav Gryaznov (and I’ve started seeing them turn up in exam lists for the more challenging grades and diplomas). I like the idea, because it fights against some of the received wisdom I had when I was a child that you had to play things properly. That being said, my list would have been different (and is probably already different from the list I made yesterday while I was listening to.

Valse-Fantaisie by Glinka/Gryaznov
Erlkonig by Schubert/Liszt
7th Symphony by Beethoven/Liszt
Dance of the Blessed Spirit by Gluck/Siloti
Prelude in B Minor by Bach/Siloti
Adagio from the 5th Symphony by Mahler/Tharaud
Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov/Noacke
Star Spangled Banner – Rachmaninoff
Laudate Dominum – Mozart/Olafsson
Adagio Symphony No 2 by Rachmaninoff/Trifonov for 2 pianos.
Masquerade Waltz by Khachaturian/Nakajima

I bought Gryaznov’s transcriptions on the foot of something that isn’t listed above – the Italian Polka by Rachmaninoff. It, too, is a great transcription in its own right. I’ll probably never be able to learn it.

Ben’s list did not include anything from Alexander Siloti and I think that’s a pity. Certainly, they may lack of the fireworks of the Flight of the Bumblebee but the Prelude listed above (originally in E-minor I think) is utterly stunning, no matter who plays it.

Noteable releases: Trifonov/Babayan

Trifonov/Babayan Rachmaninoff for Two

I really wish that Daniil Trifonov and Henle or someone would do a deal and release his transcriptions. He has done some lovely work on Bach.

However, quite by chance, I found out about this yesterday. I asked myself, how good can it possibly be? Oh god, it’s amazing. I’m not really familiar with Sergei Babayan’s playing but I’m going to be frank, this album is approaching the recordings Trifonov did of the Rach concertos a few years ago and I wish he would record the cello sonata without a pesky cellist grabbing all the limelight.

In particular, I’d kill to have the sheets for the Symphonic Dances from this. It’s amazing.

This is one of those albums that has to be on your listen-list. I really would love to see them if they toured. This lad does things with a piano that very, very few other people can manage. I love listening to him play.

There are not enough superlatives in the world for this. The dynamic range is extraordinary; the pianos sound like god built instruments and the mics are disturbingly clear (this means one of them was singing along while playing). It’s the end of March. Debargue’s Fauré album is exquisite, and Tharaud’s duet album is also due in May and I expect wonderful things from that (the tasters are already gorgeous).

But I have a feeling this will be my piano album of the year.

Alexandre Kantorow and the HKPO at Bozar, Brussels, 9 March 2024

I didn’t realise when I was booking the concert tickets, but the performance of the Hong Kong Philharmonic and Alexandre Kantorow was the opening concert of the Clara Festival of music in Brussels. In one way, it didn’t matter.

Looking at Alexandre Kantorow, it’s really hard to absorb just how young he is, how recently he won the Tchaikovsky and just how much buzz there is around him. He’s 26 years old. I remember when I thought that was ancient. But that was 40 years ago. Maybe 35 years ago.

He was scheduled to play Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. It’s the case that I would never pass by a chance to hear a piano/orchestra work by Rachmaninoff, and this was the second time in six months I was up to see this, albeit with a very different orchestra and a very different soloist. As usual, I hunted for seats that gave me an optimal view of the piano keys, and found myself in the front row. I was very glad to be there because watching Kantorow touch the keys of a piano is a remarkable experience and almost mind altering to be frank about it. His pedalling style is intriguing. I don’t understand how he does it, in the same way as I don’t understand how Yuja Wang does it with high heels (although that is still more easily understood that Kantorow pedalling with zero purchase on anything; just hanging in mid air).

So, to the performance. It was extraordinary. These pieces, they are standard repertoire, and you could cynically say there’s nothing more that can be said with them that we haven’t already heard from superstar pianists in the past. But Kantorow, there’s something special about how he plays, how he physically approaches the keys (and the pedals), almost as though he is sculpting sound from the air. Watching him play is as much a performance experience as hearing the notes sounding that result. I would have given anything to sit in a solo recital in the same seat just to see what he does with Liszt and maybe some more Brahms.

The standouts for me were the 15-20th variations. I don’t usually pick out pieces like that (especially not in that work as I think it stands complete). I would cheerfully listen to and watch him play those almost ad infinitum. He reinforced the cinema images I have always had from them (black and white moves of the interwar years) and the interplay with the orchestra was just * chef’s kiss*.

He gave us one encore, a piece of Brahms, one of the waltzes from Opus 39. I’m not sure what arrangement he played whether it was A major or A flat major. I note this only because I spent some time looking for it this morning and I found it existed in several forms, all done by Brahms himself. I find the A major arrangement for solo in my sheet music. The touch was delicate and in only the way that Brahms could compose, full of yearning love. I added it to my to be learned list but of course I’ll never play it like that.

Opportunities to hear him play should be grabbed.

The rest of the programme consisted of a commission for the orchestra by a Hong Kong based composer; as contemporary pieces go it was listenable and enjoyable. I suspect it will stay in their repertoire. The main event following the concerto was Brahms’ mighty first symphony. This is a piano blog but I will acknowledge that on the symphony front, Brahms and Sibelius, they the men. This was wonderful. But really, the highlight for me was Kantorow.

Love of my life

I bought this when I was about 15 years old.

That wasn’t today or yesterday. In fact, it was about 35 years ago and I bought it in a music book shop in London. I would give anything to find it again but I suspect it doesn’t exist. In my memory, it was a branch of Oxford University Press but it was, above all other things, a dream world. It had floor to ceiling drawers with mysterious labels. Ladders to get to the higher drawers. Middle aged men having heart attacks as I searched for Rachmaninoff’s name on the drawers.

I wanted two things. This and something else called Grieg’s Piano Concerto. Both of them together were too expensive, so after some no doubt annoying humming and hahing in the shop, I chose Rach. I’m not going to say Rach 2 has always been my favourite piano concerto but I hadn’t heard Saint-Saens 5 by then and Rach 2 is currently my favourite piano concerto.

You can tell this is an old edition. It doesn’t have the standard pic of Rach on the front of which most of the Boosey and Hawkes editions of his concertos do. Also, it is extremely grubby.

I didn’t really realise how grubby it had got until I looked at it today. I took it a lot of places with me. I sat in cars, on rugs, at picnic tables, analysing it, listening to Julius Katchen’s iconic recording and picking out bits of it. We got that from the Great Composers back in the day, on cassette and I recommend it. It’s a tragedy he died so young. The tape lived in my Walkman for most of my teenage years except when I was listening to Jean-Michel Jarre.

One of the girls I knew at choir said the coda was very hard and I would never learn it. She didn’t know it was a coda but the notes were small and there were lots of them. My music teacher did not want to know about it. It’s not like there was an orchestra handy where I grew up. I’m not going to say I was actively discouraged but I definitely was not encouraged.

Looking back, I think this was a pity. Claire Huangci says she learned it at 14. I bet she was encouraged. It’s standard repertoire. There are any number of renditions of it on YouTube. God I would have loved YouTube as a teenager. I just had The Great Composers partworks in cassettes. I learned the opening chords, before I bought the sheet music, from the accompanying magazine. I think my mother donated those magazines. I may regret that now.

I started learning it the summer I was 17. I was doing exams; I had worked my tiny little heart out on chemistry French and maths for two years; I had 2 weeks off before my exams would start and at that point, I didn’t think there was much I could do to improve further my chances in the Leaving Certificate in 1990. I scored two As, 4 Bs and a C back in the day when that meant something (old woman shakes fist at sky about the simplification of the maths syllabus amongst other things) so I probably wasn’t far wrong on that. I knew my theorems and I was the first person in years to do the chemical equilibrium question at my school and I got it 100% correct. I’m not bragging here. I’m about to explain that what I engaged in for the study break was the greatest torture known to a family in Ireland whose piano was in the same room as the TV.

I started learning the second movement of Rach 2. It was in E, a key I preferred to C minor in general (this is still the case). I used to get up, have breakfast, fill a pint glass with Ribena, the sugar filled version, put it on top of the piano, open Rach 2 somewhere in the middle and repeat a few bars endlessly. I must have spent 5 or 6 hours on it on occasion. I have a very fuzzy memory now but I’m certain I had had afternoon practice sessions which lasted 4 hours or more. I cannot imagine the focus I had that allowed me to decipher the notes (sight reading is not my strongest point although it has improved lately), and get myself to a point where I could play around the first – well this is the question. If I look at where I think I stopped, I got about 4 minutes in before I hit the polyrhythms for which I had no help at all and never navigated. But I really didn’t realise it was that far. I almost definitely got about a minute and a half in. There are some notes in the script – not many because mostly I tend to put in things to help to get the rhythm right and after a few years of RIAM and the Leinster School of Music, I have a horror of notes on my script (so I’m totally out of sync with most musicians, it seems) and everything is carefully in by pencil.

Why are we talking about this today? Because I have heard people learning Rach 3 on Reddit and Rach 2 on Tonic and I realised, if they are doing it, why can’t I? I am sure I wrote a bit about some of the people learning Rach 3 and yet I cannot find it quickly. So squirrelled away at the back of my head is that I would pick up the piano concerto again. The same movement – I love it – and start seeing if I could reawaken the memory of what I was able to do when I was 17 years old, drinking Ribena by the pint class. Today, I took it out and looked at how godawful grubby it is. I have the Henle Urtext on my iPad as well but there is some sort of emotional connection between me now (better sight reader and with some tools to deal with polyrhythms) and a girl with a crazy unrealistic dream in a house in the middle of rural Ireland.

I cry tears for that girl sometimes. She had a lot of life before her; I know now what that life included and a lot of it didn’t include a piano which is perhaps a shame.

I can’t still play the first 4 minutes. But I can – almost at will – play the opening page without fault and I can make it sound heart breaking. There is something about I play that which is absent in how I play Mendelssohn, for example. You can pick up senses of it in the Rebikov that I play with affliction when the mood takes me. But the heartbreak in these notes by Rachmaninoff is on a different scale.

I should be learning other exam stuff. I can’t even say how far I will get with this piano concerto this time. It’s mostly way above my skill level when you look at the piece as a whole. But I am now 50, and I can do what I like and what I like at the moment involves pieces of the greatest piece of piano music ever written.

20240210 Practice Diary

This week, on Tonic, I was in the Gold list having gotten myself promoted a couple of weeks in a row. Now, playing with the big boys and girls. The ones who clearly don’t have full time jobs. * rueful smile.

I haven’t done today’s practice session yet so who knows this could change after I have done it. It was at best a mixed week. I missed at least one day because I was at a concert (a good reason, you would admit). But I also started a new job and much to my surprised this has resulted in me getting home later rather than earlier. I didn’t have so much time to practice, and also not so much time to listen in to other people practising.

So, in terms of what went well: the Mendelssohn is getting slightly more security; it’s not where I want yet but okay, there are no obvious weaknesses except when I am tired. The Rebikov is now more or less internalised but in some odd hybrid short/long term memory mess. This means some times I can play it under finger without one error; last night I spent a lot of time again trying to render a section of fluent, a section that I know intelleuctually in my mind but my fingers take on crab like features of their own and I watch as a C sharp/A figure turns into something akin to a diminished chord undescribed in no music theory text book; a flow of notes that my wrists do not wish to play even as I know in my mind what notes they are. More work is required. Nevertheless, despite being the last of the pieces I started learning, it is the second closest to ready.

For Elissa Milne’s Indigo Moon, I have struggled to memorise this. I would like all four pieces to be memorised so there’s work to be done here. I didn’t touch this for several months (and it shows) but although I can’t play it fluently at all, it is in reasonable health for the effort it got. With both Rebikov and Mendelssohn demanding less time over the coming month or two, I expect this to be okay as it was fluent at one point. The shapes are broadly okay for my fingers.

This leads us to the Bachs, Johann Sebastien and his son Carl Philipp Emmanuel. Invention in E major is out (I have no idea but it really wasn’t coming for me at al) and Solfeggio is in. The read through for that went okay, and the chunks of it getting touched in practice is about half the piece. This is a piece that I absolutely have to memorise – I cannot read at Prestissimo velocity – and it is a piece that demands work with a metronome. It is nowhere close to written speed and that will be a while. But it altogether feels more realistic than his father’s easy training piece. It will also feed into the Rameau I have lined up for after.

Outside that, there were two or three other pieces this week. Reddit’s Piano Jam for the month had a small waltz by Shostokovich so I read that through, and I’ve also been working on the infamous C Major prelude that is Fur Elise-sque in its popularity with being hacked to pieces and murdered screaming. I’m influenced by Alexandre Tharaud’s carefully pedalled recording. I am happy with how this is going although strangely enough I struggle to memorise it. But it is very easy to read. And just because I was super angry about the Bach invention last week and needed something more motivational, I have Handel’s Sarabande on the go, also easy to read, but I haven’t tried the couple of variations yet.

At some point I need to write a piece on sightreading and discuss all the can’t lose hints I keep seeing.