Adagio sostenuto
This week I have had five minutes for the piano before I left the house to go to work. It’s autumn and the morning light is changing. And I am working on Consolation No 2 by Liszt.
Normally I’m not sure about only giving this five minutes in the morning but it truly makes the morning beautiful when those notes fall into place. I love it.
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.
One of the nice things about living in the future is how much better some aspects of it are compared to pass. I submitted my performance exam on Saturday and the results arrived back at 4am this morning. I know for the future that sleeping is better than waiting.
Anyway. The result was a DISTINCTION.
Most of the exams I did as a kid were the practical exams by the RIAM, and the last one I did was 35 years ago. So I had no real idea how rigid the ABRSM would be. They were reasonable I think; the feedback was sensible, it highlighted the issues I knew about (but eventually cut my losses about. The lowest score was 26 marks for Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach’s one hit wonder. The highest was full marks for Elissa Milne’s introductory jazz piece.
I see a lot of discussion on how the performance grades are easier or dumbing down. I don’t really agree. You have the extra piece. And you have the utter trauma of the recording. It must sound seductive, this idea that you can try as many times as you like to get it right. But it means getting four pieces right every single time. I’ve played in public, and I did the practical exams up to grade 5 when I was a teenager. The experience of creating a valid, acceptable, compliant with the rules film was really tough. I live in an apartment with triple glazed windows. Nevertheless I had films wrecked courtesy of:
It’s really frustrating when you have got through the 4 pieces reasonably cleanly and the film is destroyed owing to circumstances outside your control.
And then there were my own mess ups, centred mainly on CPE Bach but on occasion, Elissa Milne departed my fingers in a less than elegant manner. As it was the last piece I scheduled, those occasions were both times when I had played each of the other three pieces faultlessly.
In short, this was deeply, deeply stressful in a way that no other music exam ever has been.
And I’m going back for more. I will skip Grade 7 and move straight to Grade 8 as I need it for the ARSM which is to follow that. My target date for this is end of next year and I will work to the 2025 syllabus rather than the 2023 as the repertoire list is okay for that. Before I start preparing those pieces though, there will be a short holiday from exam syllabus music.
I practiced just once in the last 2 weeks and I will be travelling again soon. So I am going to miss the April deadline to submit the exam. In practical terms, the hall I wanted to use isn’t available until sometime in June anyway. This is a pity but there you have it. I’m not far off ready to record and submit.
I was really close to being ready about 2 weeks ago but then on a personal level something popped up that got in the way of a lot of things in my mind and work has been busy. My mind is cluttered. I put my hands up – these things happen when you are an adult I suppose although I usually beat myself up with the “other people can do it” line.
It is never very helpful. I also found myself planning around planning this morning too which is a worrying indication of a messed up scheduler. Some reflection required I suppose.
In any case, I have started working on June by Tchaikovsky, and will also start looking at some of the Rameau Cyclopes this week before I leave. I did a read through of the Debussy a few weeks ago, can’t remember when. The remaining piece is some Rachmaninoff, and that’s also been subject to a read through. I should update the project plan.
In a previous job, I considered the whole being part time so that I could free up time to play the piano. I realised that this would be fine in theory but I already couldn’t get on time working full time so all that would happen is I’d be working the same hours and being paid less. Is that a reflection on me? Some people would argue it is; they aren’t IT project managers with operational pain on the side.
So for the playing, I have some work to do.
I dragged myself up to Sapphire in my Tonic League journey and the week has been such that I will be lucky to stay there. I’ve not been listening much and nor have I had much time at the piano.
That being side, there seems to be a point at which progress seems to fly. I don’t see the progress at the individual practice sessions now but more in recognising that today, I am playing things much better than I did one week ago or three days ago. I’m definitely playing them better than I was 2 months ago but then I started one of the pieces three months ago/
I open each practice session with a full run through all four pieces in sequence; I play them in order of age, oldest to newest. I call the self selection piece “list D” so in practical terms, this means I play Lists A, B, D and C as C is the only piece by a living composer. It takes 7 to 8 minutes. Mostly, I will play three of them cleanly except last night when I played none of them cleanly. After that I will work on whatever needs to be worked on, which is usually CPE Bach which is not far off target pace and one of the other pieces where the errors have been rather unfortunate. Occasionally I give Mendelssohn a little more detail.
What I’m finding is that I am occasionally bored of all of them now; I guess this is human and it’s one of the reasons you get advised not to work on something beyond your current skills +a little stretch – you will get bored. Because the Bach invention took so much time and then I whisked away from it, I’m behind with the CPE Bach and it’s really the last thing to cover before I do the recording for the exam. But I have to maintain the other 3.
I love playing the CPE Bach. To be honest, I’ve found it far easier than any of the other 4 pieces I’ve worked on for this exam. It’s not even the sound of it but the way in some places, particularly the F Minor section that my fingers fit so perfectly to the run of keys. It’s amazing.
One of the things which surprised me in the shakedown was that all 4 pieces I’ve lined up for Grade 6 are in minor keys. This wasn’t deliberate, and initially, the List A piece was in E Major.
I’m looking forward to having the Grade 6 submitted and recorded. It won’t be so long now I think and I really need to get a tripod so that I can do the recording.
In the meantime I have started working on the first of the Grade 8 pieces. I think I’ve look at all of them briefly at the piano and during the week, the one that made it to the piano stand was June by Tchaikovsky. It didn’t occur to me to vet it for small finger problems (let’s say the Rachmaninoff was the highest risk there) and that was somewhat of an error.
I scheduled Grade 8 for the end of 2025. I won’t object if that comes in slightly ahead of schedule; in any case I will need to track down a teacher at some point. Grade 8 is a gatekeeping certificate; the diplomas do not open up until I have it.
This afternoon I have piano time on a grand acoustic, hopefully a Steinway. I’m looking forward to it; I don’t think I’ve had the opportunity for the last 3 or 4 months.
Last night, to get to a wonderful rendition of Bruch’s first violin concerto, I had to sit through a work called Feast During a Plague by Sofia Gubaldulina. I’ve never heard of her but with Bruch and Prokofiev on the menu, I had filed the piece under “how bad can it possibly be” and bought the ticket anyway. The other two pieces were worth the ticket price. This was not. In answer to “how bad can it possibly be”, the answer is truly, unequivocably awful.
Apparently some people – I don’t know who, whether they really exist or how high they were – have called her the world’s greatest living female composer. I have no idea why. I really have no idea why. I don’t know how the orchestra suffered through it and I believe they have to again tonight in Charleroi. For the first time in my life in a concert hall, with a high quality orchestra on the bill, I heard an audience boo a performance. This is highly rare. If they got applause, it was for suffering through this piece.
I loathed it. I’ll admit I’m not a fan of much atonal output anyway – I think it’s self indulgent trash for the most part, and this was utterly devoid of a melody. It had some structure yes, but who cares when ten minutes in you’re wondering when the torture is going to be over. When you see her name being mentioned in sentences with Shostakovich, it’s the sort of stuff that makes me vomit. Shostakovich – whether you like him or not – wrote singable melodies. The second movement of his second piano concerto is a truly beautiful thing (if not the rest of it) and in one of his Jazz Waltzes he has given us a truly amazing short work whether you hear it played by an orchestra or a piano or two (there are a fair few transcriptions around), it is wonderful to listen to.
There is a recording of this Gubaldulina work somewhere on YouTube where at least one of the ten commenters described it as “lovely”. It is anything but. It is unmelodic, harsh discordant mulch with too much running around by the percussion crew. We use the world “lovely” to describe Rachmaninoff’s 18th Variation from Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. We use the world “lovely” to describe Puccini’s arias. We do not use the world lovely to describe self indulgent atonal compositions that should not ever have the indulgence of being performed and imposed on a paying audience who would not pay money for it if it were the only work on the bill. I cannot imagine that this is the Gewandhaus’s best selling album by any stretch.
From what I can see, the audience hated it. They were fidgety from about 10 minutes in, and shortly afterwards, they started chatting. There was a large group of bored teenagers in who loathed it. We have one of the top violinists playing Bruch like an angel afterwards but this nonsense lost a bunch of young people. Orchestras need young people. It’s why the hell we have concerts of computer game music all of which is better than this. It’s why we have concerts of Hans Zimmer’s music.
I understand the need to schedule new music. But for the love of god, if that new music is atonal please don’t schedule it with Bruch, or Prokofiev. She might have been a contemporary of him and Shostakovich but it’s no wonder they are known and she is not so much.
I love the BNO. I love the Henri Leboeuf hall in Brussels. I’ve been to some stunning concerts there. But whoever programmed that needs to explain why they programmed that with the Bruch and Prokofiev. It was an awful, awful choice, completely counter to the beauty of the other two. It didn’t complement them. People left that concert hall at the interval (as they do for Bartok symphonies).
Contemporary music doesn’t have to be like this. At the end of the day, if you want to play atonal crap, you have to accept that not a lot of people want to listen to it and without an audience, what is music anyway? Meanwhile, people like Ludovico Einaudi are selling out major arenas as did Ennio Morricone.
You might judge people for liking that simplistic crapola and not being sophisticated to recognise the true genius of Feast During a Plague. But there is a reason that when people are asked who their favourite composer is, it isn’t this that they are answering. Nothing from the atonal world comes close to matching a Bach or Mozart.
This was not music. I never again want to hear it.
I missed the weekend because I was in Dublin, to see Maxim Vengarov. I know he plays the violin but still….
Anyway, the practice was daily except Sat and Sunday so I broke my streak. I’m struggling. Really struggling to get further than about 15 days in a row. But all that days I have missed in March so far were travelling days.
So where are we: quick look back at last week. Okay. The fingering accuracy problems which were a major feature of last week are not such a problem this week. I’m inclined to think they are hormonal and I probably should track them as such in my practice journal. This leaves us with a review of what I got up to since I last posted.
I played other stuff this week at various times, sometimes when I am tired or lost and also because I passed through Brussels and Dublin Airports and touched pianos in both airports. This week that included the Waltz Opus 30/15 Brahms, the A major setting (by Brahms himself). Currently stuck on the opening piece as I shape my fingers to it, but I love it and I think it will be a useful building block to 118/2, the other great expression of unrequited love I think. From the Celtic repertoire, there were the following pieces:
All pieces that I love. I also touched Exodus, Scarborough Fair, I dreamed a dream from Les Miserables, and I think that was about it for the late night session last night.
For my next trick I need to start booking grand piano time a bit more frequently, and then I also need a tripod for my phone so I can film the exam submission by the end of the month. I’m really pleased about this.
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.
I have blocked my right ear lately – I know this is too much information and yes I have drops and yes I enjoy the absolutely awful sensation of them. Nevertheless, the last time this happened I wasn’t playing the piano.
So practice today has been pretty challenging as only one of my ears is working.
I had some empathy for Beethoven and I am terrified about losing my hearing.
On the practice front, it has been mixed these last two days. I dropped out of Platinum back to Gold on Saturday night in the Tonic Community. Not a disaster but currently I am second which means I will be probably on my way back up on Saturday. The issue here is that I won’t have a piano on Sunday, Monday and most of Tuesday. So I don’t even have to guess but I’ll be staying exactly one week in Platinum again. Last week was the lowest amount of time I spent playing in quite a while.
Mostly today was marked, in addition to half deafness, to having the craziest memory issues that I’ve had. They kind of started on Sunday at some stage, so that the two main pieces that I know more or less by heart were just into roadblocks on occasion. Milne is almost ready though so out of the 4 exam pieces, 3 of them are usually under reasonable control so only the CPE Bach remains to control. That has been challenging with a memory that is just laughing at me.
I will see Alice Sara Ott in concert on Thursday this week (so yeah, I may run out of practice time and not make Platinum after all).
On Reddit there is someone learning Rach 3. He’s 6 years younger than me and he has always wanted to play this. I get the motivation; I want to do it with Rach 2. It’s likely to be a 10 year project if I do it. There are bits I want to have a go at in both it and Rach 4. But I need to do effective planning skills and decision making and I give a pretty decent chunk of that to work. That pays for all the music I buy. And will pay for my grand piano when I buy it. I should blog about those dreams again. I don’t regret letting that last one go but at some point I will want to buy one.
And there are some opening themes in Brahms I that are talking to me at the moment.
It’s 1040 on a Monday night. Really, I should be in bed. But I worked from home today and that disrupted my view of myself and my little world. I did get to practice at lunch time though which was nice.
One of the gaps I identified for myself at the start of this more recent piano journey was sightreading. I suppose in part, it was because I wanted to read music as fluently as I read English. This might be unrealistic; I’ve been reading English since I was three years old and that is now a frighteningly long time ago. But arguably, my sightreading is weaker than I would like. I imagine a world where I can read anything I want up to and including Chopin’s third Sonata which is the apex of my ambitions, apart from buying a Steinway B, that is. But I struggle with sightreading, especially lefthand because I learned treble clef a couple of years before I learned bass clef. I struggle with ledger line notes too.
So I did what any sane person does when they want to get better at something. I searched sightreading on YouTube and disappeared down an increasingly disappointing black hole. There is a huge amount of advice out there from people telling you how you can sight read better. What most of them have in common is that they are targeted at people who know absolutely no music theory at all, have no basis in reading at all. I suppose it’s the easiest place to start with pedagogical stuff on sight reading. I’m not the target audience. I realised I was not the target audience because once you got past the names of the lines on treble and bass, there was an emphasis on understanding the length of notes. I know this. Understanding intervals: I know this. Understanding key signatures. Come on!. I know most of these too. I know that five sharps tells me it’s B major or G sharp minor. I’ll possibly draw them in the wrong order but interpreting them, I get there.
So what I’ve come to understand is that I’m a better sight reader than I gave myself credit for. Still not good enough but the hints around knowing how to read are unrealistic for someone who actually knows how to read; the point is to read more and more and get faster. When you see discussions about this on Reddit, the advice is that it is a numbers game. I read a piece by Elissa Milne a few weeks ago where she noted that in general, the higher some of her students went in the graded music education system, the worse their sight reading got for the simple reason that they weren’t doing enough of it. I’m not a fan of the Numbers Game but in general, she came up with a plan to increase engagement of students and to get them to sight read a whole lot more. That’s the 40 piece project that I have going in the background (see here). I’m not really on top of it because I don’t always have the music to hand and practice time has been thin on the ground these last couple of weeks. But I have done some things outside the scope of the exam pieces I’m working on. There has been some Beethoven, some Shostakovich, some Haydn, all composers that I don’t regularly touch. I have worked on a couple of pieces by Beethoven – the infamous Bagatelle that everyone knows, and I intend to learn the second movement of Shostakovich’s piano concerto no 2 and one of his waltzes. I have sheet music for both. Haydn I tend to bypass.
Of the pieces that are being worked on for repertoire, there is Handel’s Sarabande and Variations, and Prelude in C Major from Bach’s WTC. I’m not a fan of Bach senior but there are some glorious things knocking around. I also have Siloti’s transcriptions of some of Bach’s stuff. So I may adjust the list currently here to take account of other things I want to learn.
I started learning CPE Bach’s Solfeggio during the week to replace the List A Bach that I wanted to abandon. It’s astonished me how much easier it was to sight read than I expected. I’m assuming that part of it is linked to the short pieces I work on now and again and that this has helped a lot. So yes, in short, it’s a numbers game.