Category: Grade 8

Practice – some time has passed

It’s Tuesday and it’s raining heavily outside. I have barely played for three or four months and I’m well aware that the longer this state of affairs continues, the less likely I will make December for Grade 8. So I have started practising. Not daily (bad Treasa) but a bit more frequently. Greater than Zero times. I also bought a couple of copies of Pianist.

What’s the progress this week? I think my fingernails are too long. I don’t know where my cute nail care kit is. I watch Annique Gottler’s videos about learning the four Chopin Ballades in six weeks. I haven’t touched the first one since before Christmas. I looked at the Raindrops Prelude a week or two ago, so there is that. It’s in the key of D flat.

D flat seems to be everywhere. Especially it is in the Rachmaninoff that I am not practising at the moment. After some careful consideration of what worked for Grade 6 (focus) and what did not (trying to do everything at once), I have decided to set two pieces aside for the time being. The two hard pieces. The Rachmaninoff and the Liszt. I have decided to focus mainly on the Rameau which I love, and the Debussy which I am struggling with.

Mostly, the Rameau had been memorised, while slow to play, it had been under my fingers. This was no longer true so for the last few practices I have been working on fixing that. In fact, there is just one set of bars on page one bouncing around D minor, that I struggle to memorise correctly. Today, very slow practice, it’s okay. At the kind of speed it will take 20 minutes to play the piece. Bearing in mind that on average, pros seem to knock it out in about 4 minutes, there is a lot of work to go there with the metronone and there in lies some problems. There are two bars which I simply don’t play at the correct rhythm. Technically it is common time although it definitely plays more like eight eight which I don’t think I have ever seen written down. Anyway, two bars have a batter where they come in on the end of a crotchet as a quaver. I don’t get the line in correct any time. It is going to be painful to count out with a metronome.

That aside, there are a few other shaky bits but I actually think this is not far off completion.

The Debussy is less happy. I am unhappy with page 2, and have decided to look at all of the rest of it, and learn it in pieces. I did this with two of the grade 6 pieces (after trying everything else) so my hope is that I will have building blocks at some point and can then try to glue them together. Page 1 is okay. Page 2, not so okay.

And that’s it really. No Rach. I was struggling with the triplets. I’d feel a lot happier if I had more of Debussy done; as it is, I have ten months to do the other two; normally should be enough as the later pieces go faster for some reason (hence the focus) but I can’t be certain I won’t lose weeks of practice again.

We’ll see.

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.

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.

20240914 Practice Log

According to Tonic, I am on a practice streak of 14 days. I find this difficult to believe because it doesn’t feel like I’ve touched the piano every day for two whole weeks. On the other hand, I was on the Silver League last week, made it [just about] up to the Gold League and I’m leading that now so I will definitely pass to the next one which is either Diamond or Platinum. I can’t remember. I also finally accumulated the crazy number of points I needed to move from Level 7 to Level 8 on their scale. So on that gamification front, looking good.

On the music front, where are we, really? I’m prepping Grade 8 for ABRSM, so that bit hasn’t changed anyway. Until some day this week this meant Rameau and Liszt. As of the day before yesterday, there is a bit of Debussy and Rachmaninoff in the mix now. So roll call on the pieces:

Rameau Les Cyclopes: this is moving forward very slowly. But it is moving forward and I feel hopeful that a lot of it will be done by Christmas this year. I’ve solved the fingering issue I mentioned here. Now the question is internalising the notes so that I can play them at the required pace (it’s funny how fast I come to a grinding halt here). Mostly I spend time touching out the notes in line with a metronome – I’d film this except this morning I was practicing in my night dress – to ensure that I get them at an even pace. I’m happy with this.

Liszt Consolation No 2: I like to think this will enable me to play Brahms 118 at some point in the future – for some reason it gives me a similar vibe, I don’t know why. Anyway, this too is moving forward, albeit more slowly than I expected. I have some major challenges coming up when I pass through this pass but truly the problems I have are the memorisation issues.

Debussy Reverie: In a fit of pique on Thursday night and against the advice of my inner teacher who seems to feel I should get more of Les Cyclopes and Consolation No 2 under control before siphoning off practice time to the French and the Russians amongst my aspirations, I pulled out Reverie. Page one is not very difficult to read so why not. I’m happy I did (take that, inner teacher). The challenges are, needless to mention, in the musicality and with the timing here and there. There is a polyrhythm I need to get under control. But I like the feeling of it, and while it seems counterintuitive, I’m starting with the metronome early here.

Rachmaninoff Moment Musical 16/5: This comes with a lot of baggage. It is in the key of D flat. It is a neverending train of triplets on the left hand. There are few if any impossible chords to play (unique for the composer in question). The target set for this for the next few weeks is short. It is 5 whole bars. There is a chord split between right and left hands which is just soul destroyingly beautiful to hear.

On the pieces front, so good. I’ve also been doing a lot of sight reading but I’m going to split that out to a different entry.

All in all, it’s been a good week. I’m quite happy with it. The target date for Grade 8 was initially set at the end of 2025 because I thought I’d be doing the older syllabus and the exams had to be done by 31 December. But since I am doing the newer syllabus, this is no longer necessary. In part, I gave extra time because I was skipping the Grade 7 exam [didn’t much like the syllabus when I reviewed them and anyway I had other targets on the diploma front]. I’m wondering how much of the extra time I will need. It’s quite confusing because when I sit at the piano, I don’t feel it’s going particularly quickly – my most recent comparison was the Solfeggietto which went really fast compared to the other 3 pieces on the grade 6 = but against that, it’s making the kind of progress that suggests with a good run, I could see this come in before next summer. Being realistic though, this won’t happen because I will miss most of December and a couple of weeks in November as well. That being said, the practice time is moving in the general direction of 90 minutes. This is reasonsable I think if 4 pieces are on the schedule.

Okay, that’s it for this.

20240824 Practice Diary

It’s been a while since I’ve been practising, sadly. When I got to Hamburg I had not played in about 3 weeks. But I am getting back there this week and what am I working on.

Liszt Consolation Number 2. This is a gorgeous piece of Accessible Liszt for which the left hand starts on a half between the first and second beat. It’s not a polyrhythm but I am finding it a bit counter intuitive. There are moments it comes right for me and I think god, how can I create something so beautiful, and then there are moments it does not.

Rameau Les Cyclopes. I love this and the first page of it is mostly a joy to work with. It’s not listenable (sorry to my Tonic stream audience) as a performance yet as there is a pesky arpeggio in it which must surely have been easier on a harpsichord. So this is very much the subject of slow practice and I need to start putting time in on metronome practice with arpeggios in general.

Repertoire: I keep practising three of the pieces I did for Grade 6 as they are appropriate for, inter alia, playing Steinways in piano stores. Those pieces were by Mendelssohn, Rebikov and CPE Bach. CPE Bach does not work most mornings for some reason and yet it’s the one I use to warm up mostly.

Sight reading: this week I took two pieces from the issue of Pianist sitting on my piano (well one of them =- I have two). It’s the August-September Edition and the two pieces were:

  • Aria by Antonio Fragoso. He was a young composer when he died – 1897 to 1918 so this is basically late Romanticish. It’s a pretty piece in Gminor which makes extensive use of the sustain pedal. Worth a look if you are looking for sightreading practice. Pianist marked it Intermediate
  • Eastern Promise by Melanie Spanswick. This is in A Minor with one or two rhythm tests in it for all that it is a short piece. Again, good sightreading practice if this is a weak point you are trying to fix.

Neither of these pieces are on my 40 pieces challange which has pretty much fallen apart. With 4 months left in the year, I will need to scale that done and reassess how I manage it as a project for next year (or I could star the project a new this week which which case I am 5% in. I will reflect on that the next time I am staring out the window of a bus. At some point, I need to write a bit on sight reading, how I feel about it, and what I want to be able to do.

I did no scales this week. I am a very bad person.