Catastrophic Practice lately

It’s January 2025. I’m planning to do Grade 8 ABRSM by the end of the year but the practice schedule has fallen apart. In a way, this was foreseeable; I travelled for a lot of November and most of December; access to a piano has been unreliable to say the least. But I have been home for almost 3 weeks now, and I have played just twice. I’m ashamed, especially given that I have a hard road ahead of me to do that Grade 8 by the end of the year. The pieces are a big step up and also, when I attempt to play them it is obvious that I have not been practising. But I guess it’s part of being an adult; a piano is not a pair of running shows and you cannot bring it everywhere you want.

I did touch one new to me piano during the holidays; where I was in France had a rather nice Gaveau, recent enough to have probably been built in Germany when Schimmel were building some of the French branded pianos. I must confess I liked it, but also, I had little to no confidence to play it.

So I need to tidy up some aspirations; get the Rameau back under some level of control, move further through Reverie. The least damaged of the 5 pieces I am looking at the moment was the Rachmaninoff and I wasn’t very far through that anyway so…For the Liszt and the Chopin, from which I should chose one, I was too cowardly to look at them. I did not look at the Chopin Ballade which is my escape piece. I merely battled with the Rameau and that was it.

Not practising is bad for me. It places doubt in my heart. Can I really aspire to doing these tests that no one else does outside ex British empire colonies? If I cannot manage Grade 8, what’s going to happen with those lovely pieces I was lining up for the diplomas. Am I faking it?

Am I just wasting my own time when I look at beautiful pianos, be they old French heroes or glitteringly shiny Steinways? Am I faking it?

So yes, the piano practice needs to get back into place, around work and around health management. I don’t know how this is going to work out especially if I insist on doing nothing, and reading (this may be why I have not played so much).

It’s 8pm on a Sunday night. I spent a good chunk of the weekend in the company of Alexandre Kantorow and now I want to play more Brahms.

it’s just, I have no idea when I’ll have time to do so.

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.

Random piano news

While I was looking up some YouTube links for the Releases of Note entry for Lucas Debargue, I discovered he was playing a piano I wasn’t familiar with. It’s a Stephen Paulello piano, a rather beautiful looking large concert grand. So I went looking.

The pianos are designed and built in France, and built to order no less. I’m not sure when I would ever accidentally get a chance to play one although I’ve played one of Chris Maene’s pianos, a couple of Faziolis and one or two of Marcus Hubner’s pianos as well. It would be interesting to try this one too as the sound on the Debargue album is beautiful. But apparently an appointment can be made to play at their workshop. It’s tempting.

20240217 Practice Diary

Another week has rolled by and I have done various things, that matter to me, if not to the wider world.

I went to my local stationery Mecca and picked up another 2024 planner. Into this I am now writing a few words daily about the practice, and tracking the pieces I play each day especially of the ones I want to play for an exam that seems far away in my mind but which was pencilled in for 6 weeks’ away. So that’s not looking great.

I’m having some memorisation problems with Mendelssohn and Rebikov. When I get the Rebikov correct, it is absolutely gut wrenchingly beautiful to play. I haven’t yet played it on an acoustic piano but I have a one in ten chance of getting it right when I play it. The same is true of the Mendelssohn. I know every part, can restart from multiple places but I rarely get a clean run through. This is frustrating because I have known to play every part of that for about two months now. I can’t remember when exactly it went clean for the first time. Neither piece is consistent.

I gave this some thought yesterday after 30 soul destroying minutes. There’s a fingering issue in the Rebikov which is improving every time I play. For the Mendelssohn, it’s a pure memory issue. I’ve seen a lot of discussion on practice lately and the advice, in the best way of things, is completely contradictory. You see advice to focus on one particular aspect of playing, to avoid mindless repetition when setting up practice points. You see advice to practice until you can’t get it wrong, but not to repeat infinitely. This is completely contradictory.

So the advice isn’t really helping. I will confess though that over the past month or so, these pieces, together with the Bach that I set aside, got the bulk of my time until this week. What I think I need to do is to do one single run through of both every day, warts and all, so that I don’t forget everything about them. But they will not form the bulk of my practice for the next week or two. I want to finish CPE Bach’s Solfeggio and find tactics to get past the shaky points of memorising E Milne’s Indigo Moon. I like the piece enough, but I can’t see myself playing it too often after the exam. Apart from that, I will start looking at some music by Clara Schumann as Tonic has a related challenge coming up and then I will be starting Cyclopes by Rameau and June by Tchaikovsky before the start of the summer. So much for the planning.

On the Milne piece, it has moments of sounding lovely, it has moments of not sounding like a human being is playing it at all. I have most of it memorised in pieces; the fitting together is catastrophic, there are pieces where I need reinforcement. I am questioning whether I want to learn it by heart at all and if it would be safer to keep the sheet music with me. I have not found a story to tell with this piece of music and with a name like Indigo Moon it should be possible. You wouldn’t know it but there is a gondolier in my minds eye, along with the canals of Venice when I play Mendelssohn.

Somewhat unexpectedly, the CPE Bach is coming along a lot faster than I really expected. It’s not anywhere close to being ready for The Audience to hear it (just some poor victims tuning in on practice streaming) but I pieced it together yesterday – this is way ahead of schedule and can now work through both pages. It being the weekend and not late at night, I have the opportunity to do some metronome practice. This is demonstrating to me that I will have a lot of problems bringing it up to a consistent speed without constant metronome practice as I try to ensure the piece fits together coherently. But despite the fingering misses (and this tends to be where I come a cropper), I really enjoy playing/practising this piece.

The sheet I have calls for Prestissimo. I am a long way short of that at the moment.

I think the only other piece I touched regularly this week was JS Bach Prelude in C Major from WTC I. In truth, I love the piece, I love how it sounds when I get it write. But because it is so easy to ready, it is beyond difficult to memorise; It doesn’t get the time because it was really only something I picked up because the Invention in E Major was causing me so difficulties. It eventually goes into the 40 pieces list which is running behind.

One of the things I need to make more time for also will be technique, especially some scales for the pieces I am doing next year. D Flat Minor is hanging over me with the nice Mr Rachmaninoff. So I will add that to the list that I have being tracked and we will see how that goes.

I am an amateur pianist

To be frank, if I had a life plan, the reality did not exactly align with it. What this means is I didn’t comply with society’s expectations for me (to bankrupt myself buying property in a property boom in Ireland, effectively) and I only got around to buying my own piano when I was 49 years old. I started hiring one about 4 years before that. So for a good chunk of my life, I assumed that as soon as I bought an overpriced house in Ireland, I would wander down to Pianos Plus and buy a piano too. Something to play until I had saved up the money for a grand piano, probably a Kawai. They have nice grand pianos.

The holy all of that is that for most of my adult life, I didn’t play the piano regularly. I played pianos in piano shops. I was too scared and shy to play them in railway stations, such that the first time I did was emotionally a big thing. I chose the Gare du Nord to do it as well. For some reason, I’ve always been afraid of disturbing people. I’m not sure why. Plenty of people disturb me. Anyway, the frank end all of this is that I’m never going to be a concert pianist and people are never going to be discussing my habit of wearing trainers and a Christian Dior dress on the stage of a concert hall. I don’t know how Yuja Wang plays the pedal with high heel shoes. That aside. I do want to play as well as I can and that means pushing myself.

One of the other things I put myself through were work recitals and there, there were a lot of people who clearly played classical music better than I can. There are a couple of reasons for this but the clear one is they played more than I did. I’m not saying I want to catch up but I will say this: if I play more I will get better.

There is a lot of material about getting better at the piano on the internet. None of it is really obviously pitched at me or people like me.

Most of what I find on the internet – with some notable exceptions – assume one of two things:

I am a complete and utter beginner
I am a full time student with aspirations of being a full time concert pianist playing all the great concert halls.

There are different impacts for both assumptions:

Complete and utter beginner

Here’s all the stuff you need to learn how to read music. Here are easy arrangements of famous pieces of music. Here are cheat sheets so that you can get away without practising that much. Here are crappy videos so you don’t even have to learn how to read music in the first place.

Full time student who is the next Evgeny Kissin

You have all the time in the world to engage in reading crap tonnes of things, practice 12 hours a day, create practice journals, bullet journal planning, learn every study written by Chopin plus the Liszt transcendentals.

I am none of these people.

Seriously. I would suggest that the following is more likely to be true: I’m not a complete beginner. I also have a full time job that often spills over into more than full time. There are days I have worked pretty much 12 hours. I spent a good chunk of my life dealing with household management. For any adult, especially people who have kids or pets, there is not 24 hours in every day. I sometimes have to get up at 5.30 to go on business trips. I get home at 8 or 9pm. Around that, I have to eat, clean. All that.

What I am saying is that for people like me, we’re looking for a little organisational help which does not involve spending ages in personal piano administration. I do not want to spend time doing lots of planning in advance of a practice session. Right now I’m trying to correct fingering for one bar of Bach. I don’t need to write a paragraph or a bullet point on this.

I probably need a teacher but without cleaning up my work schedule it’s going to be difficult (it’s coming though, oh boy is it coming).

So, yeah, I intend to avoid the YouTube videos that tell me to spend time I haven’t got over planning one line objectives: Play this piece properly.

That aside, I want to mention that there are a couple of actual teaching accounts which focus on technique and clue you in for how to play particular pieces. So special mention to the online teachers who assume you can organise yourself but if your objective includes dealing with the polyrhythms in Debussy and Brahms, here’s some support. Kudos thus to ToneBase, Josh Wright Piano, Denis Zhdanov, LeCheile music, Pianist Magazine

That being said, Pianist Magazine ran a competition for amateurs and wrote a piece on a review of their competitors and how many of them had full time, often highpowered jobs. They focused a bit too much on the music/maths link for my liking.

I suspect the vast majority of people who buy that magazine are people who are not full time concert or otherwise pianists. In many respects, it’s the people who love pianos, the sounds pianos make and they sounds they can make with pianos who are where the money is in the piano industry.

More people like me, I guess.

New [to me] sheet music (3)

I found myself myself in a secondhand bookstore today looking at their sheet music collection. It was…disappointing in a way but exhilarating that two second hand bookshops in Brussels have sheet music. Today, you were quids in if you played the violin, the electric organ or the clarinet. Actually I assume that if you play the clarinet, it must be quite wonderful to fall over the odd bit of clarinet music anywhere, nevermind a shop more used to selling fiction and comic strips.

Anyway, times were thin on the piano music but I picked up two pieces, one being a duplicate (of more anon) and the other being by Guastavino whose music I had to order specially lately (I haven’t started the piece yet). He is not yet out of copyright but is difficultly in print. I’m not sure what this will be like but I bought it anyway.

New to me Sheet Music — Bailecito by Carlos Guastavino

What struck me about it was that each page was stamped with what looks like a publisher’s mark.

Anyway. I have it.

As a teenager, aside from Rach II, a couple of pieces of cinema music seared through my mind, one of which was Richard Adinsell’s Warsaw Concerto from the movie Dangerous Moonlight. As I mostly found classical music through figure skating at that time, I assume that’s where I picked that up from. Anyway, we found a recording, probably on Naxos at some point, but the sheet music eluded me for years and years and years and years. In fact, I only picked a new copy of it sometime in the last 2 years since Pointe d’Orgue became known to me (one of the two sheet music shops that I trust in Brussels. I ordered the Guastivino mentioned above from the other, Brauer. I know them both. Anyway, Pointe d’Orgue had the Adinsell so after a near 25 year search I had it in my hands.

One of the fascinating things for me with orchestral piano music is that you can get lots of it and it all has an accompaniment for a second piano or is a reduction for 2 pianos. So the Hummel I picked up last week was a bit of a novelty. Anyway, today’s haul includes Warsaw Concerto, or more specifically, Concerto de Varsovie, solo piano.

If you’re looking for a good recording of it, I’m inclined to suggest Jean Yves Thibaudet. You can have a listen on Youtube here.

Jean Yves Thibaudet pushing out into the dead of night

Actually, I went looking for a trailer for the film Dangerous Moonlight which I have never seen and instead, I found this. The music is very clearly the star and yet, it’s completely different to any recording I have ever heard of it.

If you want to read more about the movie, you can find it here.

Anyway, they cost almost nothing. The total I spent in the shop was 5 euro 50 cents and in addition to the sheet music there was a kids book and a how to draw ballet dancers book.

When I got home I went to my “keep these safe” documents where I thought there was a copy of the piano solo of the Legend of the Glass Mountain by Nina Rota. Apparently I have put it somewhere even safer.

This is something I’ve been looking for almost as long; and I found a copy of it in the Sheet Music Library in the Central Library in Dublin about 30 years ago having searched for a while for it. No dice but I seemed to acquire a photocopy of it. I never got around to learning it but it’s still on my TBL list. I see a copy of it on eBay though which will post to Belgium so I am going to rectify that.

I’m interested in second hand sheet music sources. Point me at them.

I’m signed up to Tonebase Piano

You can find me in Community and I have a practice diary there. I am also looking at (mostly) technique course for the moment.

New sheet music

I went on a shopping spree today. I wanted to buy the Goldberg Variations – one of the things that Vikingur Olafsson succeeded in making me do was decide I wanted to learn some of them, with what time I don’t actually know but hey, I can read them anyway. I also wanted to buy Un Sospiro by Liszt – I’ve seen a couple of videos of people trying to learn them lately and I realised it is a truly lovely piece (I must have heard some serious butchering as well. In fact, I have a shopping list of music I want to buy for which I don’t have the time to learn, I’m struggling with my current set pieces and also, there’s a monumental amount of other stuff going on.

So I walked to the shop, and spent money. They had one copy of Goldberg (it’s probably popular at the moment for one reason or another).

More sheet music — A pretty blue book of Bach music.

And I found one copy of the Three Concert Etudes which gave me Un Sospiro. I don’t expect to touch this for a while, but hey, it merits reading and occasional experimentation.

I came across a video of Helene Grimaud, aged about 18 years ago (so recorded on 4:3 TV back in the day) rehearsing the piano part of Schuman’s first violin sonata. I liked it and while I have no handy violinist, I still wanted to learn some of it. They had it, past tense because now I have it.

They also had some Barenreiter anniversary specials – both they and Henle seem to be celebrating birthdays at the moment – so I picked up their collection of selected Brahms pieces.

I tend to pick up collections like this for “sight reading practice” which usually turns into “oh this is a nice Waltz or other, I should actually learn it rather than butchering it for 10 minutes”. We will see how it goes.

A few weeks ago, I found a shop selling second hand sheet music and had a flick through it and found one single solitary copy of the Hummel piano concertos for solo piano. I haven’t examined it in detail, but I assume it is just the piano part and if I want to play it with an orchestra, I’m on my own babe. But it is a thing of beauty.

I mean, isn’t the engraving gorgeous? I have one copy of Solveig’s Song which is recent but also beautiful. Oh I know the Henle blue covers are classy and stylish and all that, but seriously, some of the older designs are just more…beautiful. I could almost frame either of them (and since I somehow have two copies of Solveig’s, I actually could frame that one).

Anyway, since I bought the Rameau a while back I’ve not actually worked on learning stuff. I just blew my mind on stuff I already knew or arranged myself when testing the piano emulation software last week. Need to get back to work.

Record releases of note this week

I don’t intend to turn this into a regular feature but two records dropped yesterday which are probably worth your time.

Goldberg Variations – Vikingur Olafson. Vikingur extracted a 5 star review from the Guardian for his last live performance of these in London which is quite an achievement. It’s worth catching his social media clips actually talking about this recording because he achieves something which other pianists don’t. He places the music in the context of dreaming and backs it up. Variations 7 and 9 so far stand out.

Chopin Etudes – Annique Goettler. Annique Goettler runs the YouTube channel Heart of the Keys which is one of my go tos for feeling part of a piano community online. She’s been working on this project for a long time, the launch concert was 6 October (last night per my writing date) and one noteworthy comment from one of her local papers was the pointer at how many young people attended that concert.

Public Pianos – Heuston Station

I haven’t passed through Heuston so much lately so I did not realise the piano had been replaced. The new piano is still an old piano, but in some ways, it is an interesting piano. I’m not sure how old it is, but it’s a Zimmerman upright piano.

If I have a few minutes, and the piano is free, I tend to sit down and play it, by way of encouraging the appearance of pianos. So here we go. I had a few minutes

March of the King of Laois, arranged Lynch

I wasn’t very inspired but this is one of the ones I tend to play if I want to check out the piano. To be fair, the piano is reasonably in tune (well done John Murphy), The right pedal seems a bit locked which is a pity.

You can still buy brand new Zimmermann pianos – the brand is owned by C. Bechstein – and for a while there definitely was a dealer somewhere in Dublin. They are nice pianos in my experience.