Love of my life

I bought this when I was about 15 years old.

Love of my life
1980s edition of Rach 2, reduced for 2 pianos.

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.

On the gap analysis: Sight reading

Having written two rants on organisational stuff, I want to touch on where I see skills gaps that I want to resolve over the coming year that support the fluffy “I wanna play anything I want” aspiration we all have when we listen to Chopin.

As noted elsewhere, I have some sight reading fluency gaps. That is to say, the ledger lines still have to be counted and although I drilled them a lot last year, it’s different in actual sheet music rather than on an app while you are getting the bus to work. The other thing I want to fix are ornaments.

There are plenty of resources around for that and one of the things I intend to do is put them into my sheet music sketchbook. It’s a solvable problem and then once that is done, they will need some practice. I expect one of the practice goals to be achieved sometime in the next few days so will put that into the rotation of what I do.

Sight reading demands a bit more effort. I’ve watched enough videos to know that the issue is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of fluency. In short, I need to read more by sight. There are no tricks beyond that other than how to achieve this. Given I’ve just written a rant on the question of excessively devoting time to planning and pussying around with journals and the like, what comes out of this entry might be unexpected.

One of the things I need to make some decisions around is how much time to devote to this. I like to hope that soon, I will not be devoting 45 minutes to Bar 7 of a Bach invention (it’s frustrating given how fast the rest of it will go). I’ve seen some people talk about 10 minutes on sight reading a day, or 30 minutes a week. I’m not sure which one goes faster.

I came across something via reddit this morning: some user pointed at the 40 pieces challenge on Piano World. I dug a little deeper and came up with this blog entry by Elissa Milne. I know this name. She wrote one of my Grade 6 pieces, the jazz piece, Indigo Moon. It’s a lovely piece which will be getting much more of my attention after the dreaded Bar 7 of Bach.

The general idea is to learn at least a piece a week. I liked the underlying thought here because basically, I lived it.

The more students progressed in degrees of difficulty the more their sight-reading skills lagged behind. 

Elissa Milne

You should read the piece. It’s an eye opener to know that this has been an issue for about 170 years. It’s one of the week points of the music grade systems in the Anglo Saxon world, I think. That aside.

Where I run into problems – and have done with 100 Days of Practice – is that real life can very often be a great obstacle to dealing with my dreams of playing more Chopin. I get a bit sad when I see people talking about how everyone has the same 24 hours a day. Honestly, the quality of those 24 hours vary dependent on how many of them you have to spend getting money to live on or washing dishes. There’s a reason that there’s a saying Behind every great man, there’s a great woman. Someone had to do the laundry and it wasn’t the man.

So, in reflection over breakfast, I muse on this, and here is one place where planning is truly an investment. It’s not an investment in individual practice sessions but in a series of them. Sure, teachers who engage in this with the kids they are teaching will have a well of resources but for an adult Who Is An Amateur, it’s worth planning this in some way.

There are a couple of useful sources here (and they can be built into a forScore setlist I believe).

  • Anna Maria Bach’s little notebook
  • Bach: Little Preludes and Fugues
  • r/piano piano challenges probably up to level 4 or 5
  • The ABRSM lists for grades up to Grade 4
  • The TCM lists for grades up to Grade 4
  • The RCM lists for grades up to Grade 6

There are books of pieces knocking around. Hal Leonard does one. But I might want to choose freely and there is IMSLP.

Here’s where my inner project manager comes out: pick 40, not including the two easy ones you know already such as the Petzold, and list them in an Excel Spreadsheet. And then tick them off. Put them on the YouTube Channel on a playlist.

We will see how it goes.

New sheet music (2, probably)

Some time ago, some years ago, I picked up an album called Autograph by Alexandre Tharaud. It’s the sort of album I like – a random selection of short pieces he uses for encores (note to passing concert pianists, collections like this are inspiring – I will never be able to aspire to doing all 24 preludes by Chopin but what follows is why people like me still play the piano, years after our dreams of Carnegie Hall bite the dust). Anyway, one of the pieces that is on that album is a piece from a Gluck opera, and I think it’s labelled Dance of the Blessed Spirits.

It took a while to find it but I discovered (after finding the wrong one first) that it was a transcription by Alexandre Siloti, about whom I knew the sum total of nothing. It’s somewhere on IMSLP, but not easy to find and I haven’t got the link handy. I discovered later he had done a load of transcriptions, and one which kept popping up was a Bach transcription from a piece in E minor (there seems to be some disagreement on which Bach E minor it is with some people claiming it is not the one in WTC. Anyway, peu importe. I also discovered he did Air on a G string and in a bunch of discussions on Un Sospiro (which I bought last week), his transcription is recommended as being more accessible than Liszt’s. Apparently there is some thought that it more reflects what Liszt was playing, at least in the later days, for Siloti knew Liszt.

Anyway, his transcriptions aren’t always easy to find, but at some point, there was a comprehensive overview done, so I bought it yesterday.

It is not cheap.

The Alexandre Siloti Collection in sheet music form.

While coughing up for that I also had a look to see if by any chance they had Fauré’s Three Romances without Words for piano, because that too was on the Alexandre Tharaud Autograph album and I have troubled to find it in a bricks and mortar. However, here too I was victorious. So victorious, I forgot to see if the Liszt Sonata I wanted was there but as I only want one movement from that, I will look to see if it’s in Henle’s app and pick up the paper later if/when I start learning it in all seriousness.

Music by Fauré

The shop also sold pasta, so I also bought pasta in the shape of various music shapey things. Treble clef carbonara may be in my future.

Music pasta

BRU: Flagey: Rachmaninoff150 Day #01

The Brussels Phiiharmonic and Flagey are running a series of Rachmaninoff concerts to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth and while I will miss the two concerts dedicated to the second and third piano concertos, this weekend included the first and fourth along with And Supporting Pieces. I will pick up Piano Concerto No 1 along with Rimsky Korskakov’s Scheherazade later today but I want to post briefly about last night’s concert. Details of the festival are here.

The soloist is Boris Giltburg, artist in residence in Flagey at the moment as I understand it. He is a Moscow born Israeli pianist in his late 30s and for some reason, last night was the first time I had come across his work. This surprises me. He was excellent. Last night he chose to play a Fazioli and I think this is the first time that I have seen a piano that was not a Steinway or a Yamaha in years. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I didn’t see a Steinway. I like Faziolis so this pleased me. And I was in Row B. I know they are somewhat of the cheap seats and “the sound is better further back”. But. I like to watch the soloist and in this respect, Boris Giltburg is definitely worth watching.

The programme for last night was the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, An American in Paris by Gershwin and then, the fourth piano concerto, sometimes the forgotten of the four brothers, as it were, often overshadowed by the Symphonic Dances (which if it was programmed near me this year I somehow endeavoured to miss which is a pity because that is a mighty piece).

The Paganini was superlative. There isn’t really any other way to describe it and I doubt any other performance will match it for pure power and delicacy. I suspect the piano in part had something to do with that – for me, the piano personifies a river running through the countryside of the orchestra for that piece (and sometimes that countryside is frozen, covered in frost and snow with ice on the surface of occasional pools of still water) and the sound of the Fazioli definitely enhanced that image for me. Equally, the fourth piano concerto was an outstanding performance – it is hardly surprising that Giltburg picked up standing ovations for both performances and will probably pick up a few more customer’s for today’s concert this afternoon. I liked him very much; he provided one encore from the Moments Musicaux, one with which I am less familiar but glitteringly beautiful nonetheless.

Touching on the Gershwin, I have to confess he is not really my favourite, and I couldn’t actually remember ever listening to An American in Paris but I must have because it was extremely familiar to me. Maybe I heard it quite often when I was very young. That being said, the performance last night was top flight. I’m left with the feeling that in the repertoire, this should be performed much more often. I would also tend to suggest that it is a piece that really bears being heard live rather than in recorded format.

After the concert, there was an Aftertalk, questions and answers with the conductor and the soloist. It was something I’ve never experienced before but I have to say it was fascinating. It touched on the challenges for both composers, the changes Rach made to the fourth piano concerto a couple of years before he died, how it fitted into his dire for American citizenship before he died. The presenter prior to the concert suggested this was a jazzy concerto and in discussion afterwards, I would venture to suggest that isn’t quite right, at least in the final revisions; I learned there are elements of jazz impro in the first edition of the concerto. But for me, again, it evokes snowy scenery rather than the jazz view of the United States o the 20s. Emigrés fall between several cultures and I suspect Rach is no different in that.

On the question of Gershwin it was pointed out that he wanted to be taken seriously by the classical establishment; that he had been an immensely musical theatre composer – I have heard this store more recently of course with Andrew Lloyd Webber. In Europe at least, Gershwin is seen as a great composer and has been for the last 40 years at least. Giancarlo Guerrero, who conducted, is fascinating in this discussion and he notes that in the US, Gershwin is still seen as lesser despite this being the first great American symphonic piece. It’s an interesting perspective and that discussion is one why those after concert discussions can be fascinating and extremely fascinating.

Anyway, I came home and took out the 18th Variation transcription for solo piano and had a go at it again. My god it is so lovely, I should put more work into it, despite the Bach two part invention that stands before me like an undesirable but necessary Everest (once I am past that, Bach will be carefully selected rather than imposed).

7 October, Rachmaninoff with the Brussels Philharmonic, Guerrero and Giltburg.

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.

More sheet music
Mount Liszt

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.

More sheet music
An essential ingredient is lacking but so what.

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.

More sheet music
I like Brahms, don’t you

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.

More sheet music
Elitist secret music

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.

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).

Evgeny Kissin at Flagey, June 20, 2023

I discovered quite by chance that Evgeny Kissin was playing in Brussels in June, so I went looking for a ticket. This was…difficult. I believe I got the last one. I want to thank the group of three that booked 3 of the last four seats. Made my life easier.

I have been fangirling over Evgeny Kissin for a very long time. He put out an album called the Chopin Album, sometime around 1994 or 1995 which I found out about on a programme on BBC Radio 4 (198kHz LW back in the day). It sounded interesting, they spoke highly of this [then] young talent, with plenty of assurance and a very promising album of piano music recorded in Carnegie Hall. I bought it as soon as I could find it. To this day, one of the best collections of Chopin music that I have ever heard and a comprehensive collection of the man’s stuff. What particularly stood out for me when I was like, 22 years old, was the 3rd Sonata.

Hearing him live was, for a long time, a dream objective. I caught him touring Hammerklavier pre-Covid, but this time, he presented an altogether more varied programme, including some Bach (never my favourite), some Chopin and some Mozart, before a second half devoted to Rachmaninov. The Chopin was one of the Polonaises, which I remember from the album I mentioned above. That being said, someone in the meet and greet queue tried to persuade me it could not possibly be Chopin.

Well it was. Definitely Chopin. I loved it. I’ve never heard it played with such verve, such imagery. If I had to choose a word to describe it, I would choose the word “cinematic”. Huge epic scenes swirled across the edges of my imagination as he played.

I am not yet very familiar with the Rachmaninoff solo repertoire apart from the preludes (which isn’t very logical to me as I otherwise love Rachmaninoff) but the performance was superlative and the couple of pieces I did recognise (the closing prelude in C sharp minor aside….) were mind altering.

The special thing about this concert is although he is very definitely the best concert pianist in the world, he makes you want to play. He is very, very inspiring to watch/listen to.

For me, this is one of the very best solo piano concerts I have been to. I would have gone again if it had been practically possible for me to do so.

Gounod’s piano music

I was looking for some choral music today, a piece out of Mors et Vita which I have already loved. Unfortunately I find it hard to find stuff on Google Music sometimes and a search brought up a load of Faust but no Mors et Vita. There aren’t too many recordings of the choral version of it lying around although an orchestra transcription pops up now and again. This is what I was looking for:

It is a great recording. Well worth buying. Michel Plasson did some great stuff with Gounod – I think it’s his recording of Faust I have too. Anyway the choir kicks in after about 2 minutes. Absolutely great stuff. I know this is a piano blog but seriously, you need to have an open mind.

However, Google did reveal that there was a new album of piano music by Gounod lying around, by Roberto Prosseda. I’ve been listening to it since I switched away from the Pearlfishers by Bizet this evening and I have to say it is gorgeous. From the opening La Veneziana, to the variations on Bach’s Ave Maria.

I’m not sure what sort of piano they used for the recording Prosseda seems to use some historic instruments and this has very much the feel of una corda. In particularly, I like this piece here:

It’s the opening track on the album and rather gorgeous. I’m tempted to go looking for it. ETA: Sheet music is here.