Category: Mendelssohn

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.

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.

Gondellied, Mendelssohn Op 19, no 6

There are a few versions of this knocking around YouTube and one of them I will link below to take the blankness off the home page.

I don’t know where I came across this piece of music first; only that I liked it enough to say “I want to play that”. There is a very nice Gondola song around from Charles Gounod that is on my list also and I’ll come to that some other time.

This has turned up on the Grade 6 list for the ABRSM local examinations for the current period. It’s the primary reason I didn’t skip Grade 6 – I was learning this anyway. What is fascinating is how different the various versions of it this are. The Grade 6 prep videos (there are quite a few) are not very pleasant to listen to in the grand scheme of things – there is not a lot of softness to the playing. There’s an interesting tutorial that focuses on the rhythm. It’s one of the interesting things – I haven’t really struggled with the rhythm for this at all – but in general, if you listen to a version like Jan Lisiecki’s version, it is very soft and in the general direction of a lullabye. There’s a glorious softness of most of the track. But I tend to prefer the voicing on other recordings, like this one.

For the opening bars in particular, there is something that makes me so glad to be able to play the piano when the sound I want comes out of the piano. Something like this. There is a glorious voicing on this and the way that bars 3, 4, 5 and 6 progress just sets my heart on fire. You’ll here how I am currently get on with it on that last link. I’ve learned that instagram does not have a block so I’m going to move my piano stuff to YouTube at some stage. Must look into.

You can find the sheet music here (it’s No 6 inside the link). For the record I bought the Henle Urtext because that’s how I roll (can’t get enough of those lovely blue covers).

One of the lovely things about working on Grade 6 pieces is that they feel more or less like adult pieces, even the Bach two part invention which I have not yet conquered too much of. There’s a lot to be said for giving people the opportunity to play music they like (and not the worthy crap that people think they should play like Bartók, I’m not bitter at all).