Category: Repertoire

Sight reading practice

I set up this idea of having a target of 40 odd pieces this year and I even made a list. But although I intended to put together the pages on my iPad to have them ready to read I never got around to it, and then I was highly occupied by the Grade 6 pieces. So it’s only recently that I started looking at The Problem this was supposed to solve, ie, not being confident enough with the sight reading.

The internet is full of quick fixes to sight reading Problems. Basically, I’d like to read fluently enough to play fluently a lot of pieces. I’ve mixed feelings – sometimes I think the reduced speed sight reading helps with the memorisation. But either way, needs must.

There were a few issues of Pianist and Pianist lying around near the piano and while I would not normally bother with beginner pieces I decided to start with those and see how far I got. What I’ve learned is that even for the easy/accessible to beginners pieces, the grading is not always consistent with the way I play. I find Beginner/Intermediate easier than Beginner sometimes.

This post is really for me to trap a list of what I’ve been doing for the last week or two. Nothing very deep.

So in no particular order other than the pile of magazines beside me here:

Pianiste (FR) No 146

  • Czerny Les Heures du Matin op 821, no 1 (GD)
  • Felix Le Couppey, Op 17/3, The Alphabet (GD)

Pianist 139

  • Antonio Fragoso Aria (I)
  • Melanie Spanwick Eastern Promise (B)
  • Christian Gottlob Neefe Minuet in F (B)
  • Theodor Oesten The Echo No 14 from May Flowers OP61 (BI)

Pianist 136

  • Felix Le Couppey No 17 from ABC du Piano [wonder if this is the same set as The Alphabet above]
  • Melanie Spanwick Mountain Stream (B)
  • Theodore Latour First movement from Sonatina No 1 in C (BI)

Pianist 137

  • Mel Bonis Raindrops OP 103 NO 9 (B)
  • Melanie Spanwick Glorious Day (B)
  • Charles Villiers Stanford (BI)

I think this exercise started about 10 days ago. Maybe a week. Not sure. Anyway, the abbreviations are GD Grand Debutant, B Beginner, BI Beginner/Intermediate. I see there are 12 pieces there already. At this rate, I could probably touch my 40 pieces target provided I do 10-12 a week.

It’s the start of September. I’m missing from the piano for about 5 weeks between here and Christmas.

Repertoire selection, reflections and more

One of the things I do when I finish one exam – okay, it looks like I have done tonnes of them but really I have not – is allow myself to look forward to Exam N+1. In practical terms, this means that when I finished Grade 5, I could select pieces for Grade 8 and now that Grade 6 is done, the next up is ARSM.

I don’t have a teacher at the moment so there is an element of suggesting that maybe I should wait. But I have one very clear criteria about pieces that I prepare for exams and it is this: I have to like them. Thus, I’m going to choose them, and while I’ll take general advice like “cover several time periods”, I’ll not be told what to learn to play. I’m 52 years old I don’t have all that much time to be lived. You can see the current state of affairs in my exam planning here under Goals and Objectives.

The ARSM recital length is 30 minutes. Assuming I go for the highest choices on my list so far, eg, some Brahms, Fauré, Gershwin and Ravel, I have accounted for 21 minutes. So I will look at adding possibly one of Granados’ Goyescas too. I will still need to find something vaguely Baroque and I probably can’t escape Bach this time. Or possibly Scarlatti.

One of the approaches I take there is to just listen to the options. There may some nice things in WTC that appeal, there may be some Haydn. The issue is the time balance. I can’t give 12 minutes to a Bach piece I don’t actively dislike but don’t really want to learn when Pavane Pour Un Enfant Defunt is there and has been on my learning list forever.

In any case, for both Grade 8 and ARSM, learning playlists are being put together and this will hopefully allow me to identify a 5 minute piece that demonstrates depth.

What I will do on my holidays…

I bought some sheets by Fazil Say lately. I’m taking a couple of weeks’ break from my ABRSM schedule as I have some travelling to do during that time as well.

So I have decided for now to start learning this

Brahms in Izmir by Fazil Say

It is really pretty and although it’s not getting hours of my time, it is very lovely to play even in learning mode.

Now what

I stand at a crossroads. This must have happened before but I don’t remember it. I spent most of my teenage years pending exams or on summer holidays from the piano. The only time I insisted on doing something I wanted to do, I was learning some of Rach II at 17.

I learned Rach II at 17
A piece not meant for Irish teens.

Treasa Lynch on a Saturday night in June

Anyway, after a week of work, I recorded and submitted Grade 6. I dread something going terribly wrong here and me having to unpublish a whole pile of posts around this in utter shame. The question, is what do I do now? I see two options:

  • Start working on the Grade 8 repertoire (and find a teacher, for the love of god)
  • Take a 2 week break and inflict scales on my neighbours. It cannot be worse than Solfeggiettio has been.
  • Do something completely different from the monster pile of sheet music I own.

Yes, that’s 3 options now that I look more closely.

The four pieces on Grade 8 are pieces I actively want to learn. There are also some pieces for “later” that I could play with too. Brahms 118/2. Chopin’s Ballade No 1. Some of Fauré’s stuff. The world is wide open.

What will I play next?

Every once in a while there is a wave of questions on Reddit of the kind “I can play Fantaisie Impromptu [or other early advanced/advanced piece] what should I play next.”

I often wonder where these questions come from. I mean, if you are playing a Liszt Consolation or anything by Chopin, and you don’t know what else to play, this isn’t actually your core problem. Much like we tell would be writers that they need to read more by other writers, I think pianists need to listen to a lot of other pianists. Chop and Liszt on their own have a metric tonne of music – if you can play one of them, why not listen to more of their music and explore it? You’ll surely find stuff you want to play that way.

The world is full of amazing stuff. Fauré’s piano output. Brahms. Beethoven. Mozart. Genuinely, if you have to ask a piano forum, the issue is probably that you are not listening to enough music.

Any reliable edition

I recorded and submitted Grade 6 today. Yesterday, for reasons, I had a look at TCL’s diploma lists and something interesting caught my eye.

I’ve already more or less decided what I would play for the FTCL/FRSM level provided it is compliant with the time requirements. But I still take a look at the list and what caught my eye on the FTCL list yesterday was that one of the repertoire pieces was the Volodos arrangement of Malaguena by Ernesto Lecuono. It’s a great piece of music, have loved it both as an orchestral piece and as a solo piano piece for a long time. This is the kind of thing that would pique my interest under any normal circumstances. The thing is, I don’t think it’s been published.

I can’t find it on stretta which is my go to source for any published music, it’s not on nkoda which absolutely is not. The only place it is turning up is Musescore. I don’t like their subscription model and anyway, a lot of what is there is transcriptions done by X, retranscribed by way. TCL call for “any reliable edition”.

What is a reliable edition of a transcription done by Volodos, but not published anywhere?

Piano transcriptions

Ben Laude’s piano channel is absolutely worth your time. He is a loss to ToneBase’s piano channel in general. Anyway, he posted this lately:

Top ten Mind-Blowing Piano Transcriptions – Ben Laude on YouTube

I really got back into buying sheet music when I came across some of the piano transcriptions done by Vyacheslav Gryaznov (and I’ve started seeing them turn up in exam lists for the more challenging grades and diplomas). I like the idea, because it fights against some of the received wisdom I had when I was a child that you had to play things properly. That being said, my list would have been different (and is probably already different from the list I made yesterday while I was listening to.

  1. Valse-Fantaisie by Glinka/Gryaznov
  2. Erlkonig by Schubert/Liszt
  3. 7th Symphony by Beethoven/Liszt
  4. Dance of the Blessed Spirit by Gluck/Siloti
  5. Prelude in B Minor by Bach/Siloti
  6. Adagio from the 5th Symphony by Mahler/Tharaud
  7. Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov/Noacke
  8. Star Spangled Banner – Rachmaninoff
  9. Laudate Dominum – Mozart/Olafsson
  10. Adagio Symphony No 2 by Rachmaninoff/Trifonov for 2 pianos.
  11. Masquerade Waltz by Khachaturian/Nakajima

I bought Gryaznov’s transcriptions on the foot of something that isn’t listed above – the Italian Polka by Rachmaninoff. It, too, is a great transcription in its own right. I’ll probably never be able to learn it.

Ben’s list did not include anything from Alexander Siloti and I think that’s a pity. Certainly, they may lack of the fireworks of the Flight of the Bumblebee but the Prelude listed above (originally in E-minor I think) is utterly stunning, no matter who plays it.

Piano Jam, April

This is a reminder to me that the two pieces on the agenda that I want to pick up [again] are

  • that Beethoven Sonatina in G with the band Romance as the second part
  • that Brahms 118/2 which is a three month piece. I got to decide whether I will delay some of the grade 8 stuff to work on that for three months….

Exchanging Bachs

I’m tired of Bach’s two part invention in E major. It’s not coming right for me; it’s lagging far beyond the other three pieces that I am doing for the Grade 6 ABRSM and the more I work on it, the more dispirited I feel.

The other pieces were relatively quick to learn under finger so I wondered if I might do better with a different piece. I didn’t remember wanting to do much of List A for the Grade 6 when I looked so I wasn’t totally enthusiastic. But that was almost one year ago and I’ve happened across more music in the meantime. So at some point since then, I had bought CPE Bach’s Solfeggio and added it to the to be learned list.

Is it a good idea to skip on the two part invention? Do I really want to admit to a piece of music besting me? It’s Bach – it’s supposed to be a challenge.

But there’s the question of keeping focused on the objective and the objective was not actually Bach; that was just a contribution. Something else could contribute – it wasn’t the only piece on the syllabus.

So I went and looked to see what else was on the syllabus and I idly considered some Schubert before I noticed the CPE Bach and thought, wait, don’t have I have that piece now in the the sheet music collection? I’m sure I bought it in Trier….

The effort on the JS Bach is almost certainly not wasted. It feeds through into improvements in other piano skills. The read through of the CPE Bach was joyfully straightforward. My sight reading. It’s not necessarily a difficult piece to read although it’s a bit finicky to play with the hand switching, and also, the fact that it is played at Prestissimo. But it feeds into the Rameau that I want to do next year so there is that.

This decision will probably cost me a month (not superb but still) but I’m also a lot happier to move away from a piece that was making me unhappy. And this variety of syllabus was why I chose the ABRSM rather than the RIAM when I picked back up the piano exams.

New listening

Lucas Debargue has an upcoming album of Fauré’s complete piano music. Apple has been dropping tasters and it really is rather attractive. This arrived during the week.

I already have some Fauré on my TBL list, one of the romances from Opus 17. It’s been on my list for a while (that’s Alexandre Tharaud’s responsibility) and I even have the sheet music. I think it is also on the 40 pieces list but I am working (sort of) through the easy ones, Anyway, the music for this appears to be available via Barenreiter too. I’m not sure I want to buy any more music just yet though (this does not mean I won’t).