October 2018 – Concerto in C Minor

Practice Diary 20181031

Today classifies as a not particularly productive day. Missed the 7am slot (frustrating but not unusual lately). I had some time free this evening so I played random stuff by ear.

Mostly, I play piano either very late at night (thanks insomnia) or first thing in the morning, so I’m more often than not, plugged into headphones. At 7pm, I cast them off on the grounds that well, it’s not like anyone should reasonably be trying to sleep at this time. The piano sounds a lot better without the headphones. But I didn’t play especially well; this is why I prefer doing the hard graft in the mornings. My fingers hurt after a day at a computer keyboard, a day sitting down. And truth be told, my planning isn’t going that well at the moment.

I probably should do a little more planning and a little less random entertainment. Today, I played my way through the Irish stuff which is instinctive, if not second nature, Sliabh nBan now that I’ve identified the name of it. The party pieces of Trip to Ireland, Kimiad, Foggy Dew. Stuff I can play with the rhythm on Róisin Dubh. But it was more a trip to play rather than practice. I am not sure how productive it is.

I have decisions to make. There is a Christmas concert coming up which I may or may not volunteer for, and so music will have to be chosen. I will choose from the Irish repertoire because there will be other people to choose from the higher level stuff. I’ve already chosen two pieces which I will need to arrange. I’ve looked at both of them tonight but am not really sure that I have them down the way I want them to sound. So I need to think about that.

After that, one of the jobs I want to do is list all the sheet music I have to hand. There’s quite a lot. I’ve been looking for a decent sheet music manager and I haven’t really found the one I want. I don’t want to spend hours scanning music, and I prefer working with paper (Tommy Doyle talks about ForScore here and I’m really not sure). But I also don’t know how much time I want to spend typing up lists and maintaining databases. I sort of wish there was an Apple Music Match for sheet music. You know, I’d point it at my copy of Ludovico Einaudi’s greatest hits, and magically it would appear in my library. But then there is loads of other music like the stuff I download from Petrucci or Freescores or Piano Street. It’s an admin job rather than a piano job.

So yeah, that needs to be done, and I need to transcribe my own arrangements of stuff, my own occasional compositions.

Today I was looking for Christmas music from Ireland for the piano, or at least Christmas carols and I remembered that Micheal O’Suilleabhain had a piece called Oiche Nollaig which means Christmas Night. There is a very striking arrangement of it on an album called The Dolphin’s Way I think but there’s a very decent youtube video of it played by Sean de Burca.

The sheet music doesn’t seem to be available. I had a look for it.

Anyway, while I was doing that, it occurred to me that really, I know Micheal O Suilleabháin for composing and arranging and I wondered how he approached piano practice. Presumably he’s done a lot of it over the years because certain things are just really second nature to him and you don’t get there without a lot of work. I mean, my instincts to build almost anything in the keys of Am, Em, G, D, Dm, C, A and E are fairly nothing compared to some of his fun things.

I realised I did not really know how to define practice. It was much easier when I was a teenager, of course. Here’s the RIAM grade N book, here’s a bunch of scales you need to be able to reproduce. And there’s some theory you need to know. You do the grade pieces under protest. You do the scales under protest

But I don’t do the grades any more. Oh I’ve thought about it. And is it really practice if it doesn’t hurt a little? What is training really? For someone who is a composer/arranger, what do they do? How do they build their practice routine? I mean, I bet some of these guys have forgotten more music than I have ever known.

Does Micheal O’Suilleabhan spend a few hours practising his own repertoire or is that just playing for pleasure the way I see it for myself? Or does he knock out some Liszt and Chopin etudes when no one is watching?

I don’t know. I don’t even know how to imagine answering that question.

Anyway, in tandem with that, I read a rather inspiring book by Charles Cooke where he deals with restarting the piano as an adult. It was written in a very different era to mine, of course, and the exhortation to buy records (which were almost luxuries at the time) was charming in a world where all you have to do is go to Youtube, iTunes, Google Music, and find pretty much any recording you want to find, of any piece of music. Including my hated Pentatonic thing by Bartok. But Cooke had one message which is as relevant today as it was when you would be lucky if your local record store had the recording of a piece of music you were looking for. Practice.

Practice for at least an hour every day. I pretend I do this, although real life is fighting hard against it. In theory, though I practice between 7am and 8am most workday mornings at least. The question is, how do I get best out of that time?

Cooke suggests time spent between repertoire, sight reading and technique. He suggests the bulk of time should go to repertoire and it should be repertoire you like. Maybe 10 minutes should go to technique. But that you should control the repertoire and the technique you choose to do. And if you practice for an hour daily, you will get better at piano.

I know for the last 40 years that if you practice something, you will get better at it. But I don’t know how to structure the practice really at the moment and this is something I am thinking about. I know you can’t practice in a vacuum and that you need goals and objectives. I know that I will be a year at least at Valse Fantaisie and I also suspect that one of the reasons I often default to the stuff I find easy is because I find it easy and because the rate of progress with Valse Fantaisie is glacial. Also, I am a perfectionist. Those 8 bars are hard

Also, I bought Hanon, and have found it less so much tedious and rather therapeutic.

So, I am thinking more in terms of strategic planning. I have plenty of sheet music. My daily music activities often include time on the tram working through sight reading apps. I know that’s improving, particularly on the top of the staff. Does this count as practice? Well yes, even if it’s away from the piano. I need to take account of the effort there. The bottom of the staff is proving harder and I need to move to the bass clef too

In terms of repertoire, I’d like to start AND finish something. This is probably unrealistic in the short term with Chopin Ballade No 2 and Gryaznov-Glinka Valse Fantaisie. They cast a different glow on things like Nocturne in C Sharp (posth) and the Moonlight Sonata. So I see an argument in favour of working through a challenge piece and a more accessible piece.

So, in short, for my piano practice duties, I see the following being necessary:

Scales
Technique/Therapy Hanon
Technique/School of Speed (Czerny)
Repertoire Accessible
Repertoire Impossible Dream
Pitch practice
Sight reading practice
Transcription of own output

After that, I can have self indulgence time. Playing the easy stuff, the stuff I already know, the stuff I want to maintain. I need party pieces and I used to play cliche Fur Elise and cliche Mozart Sonata in C (first movement). I’ll find out soon enough if they have made it to my piano music storage here but meh, cliché.

I should probably write up some goals to be honest and also, set priorities for those days when I don’t get to everything.

Things that scare you

I moved from Dublin to Luxembourg in 2016 and part of my journey to Luxembourg took me through the Gare de L’Est in Paris. Flight to Paris, you see, and a train to Luxembourg. I had HOURS to kill in Paris, armed with quite a lot of luggage.

Gare de L’Est has a Yamaha piano, and I summoned up all my guts to play it – if you look for the #pianoengare hashtag, you’ll know that the SNCF pianos are often played by extremely able pianists and I think there is video of Valentina Lisitsa, for example. It’s intimidating and I have to be honest, I didn’t at that time, have a lot of self confidence. What I had, I summoned up and noodled at the piano for around 20 minutes before I got cold and went in search of something to drink. It was…interesting. I had not actually played the piano regularly for many years.

It’s a good piano.

I have a dreadful tendency not to be able to say no sometimes, and especially, if someone is asking me to do something which in a way, terrifies me. This year, I got asked to play piano in public-ish (how public is an even which features a bunch of your work colleagues) and with a lot of concern, I agreed. There were some limitations in terms of repertoire and eventually, having decided on some pieces, I got on and did it. I won’t say it went perfectly – I had a nervous crisis at the piano, precisely because I knew all these people. In a way, the train station pianos are easier.

But it was good for me, not least because it provides an unusual motivation to practise, and it made me think about how I approached the piano. Do I play for me, or do I want to shine and sparkle for others?

I tend to think I play for myself. That it is a self indulgence. I’d like to hope it’s one which will stave off dementia in about 40 years time (I dread aging for some reason). But I also felt that accepting the risk of doing things which scare me – like performing in public – is good for me. Not just because it motivates me to practice, but also because it motivates me to open up. Both pieces I played back in May in a work concert were arranged by me (with not one piece of sheet music to hand because that’s just not the way I work). I’ve been asked about a transcription since, and that too, has motivated me to think about how I might approach that. There is software on my iPad, but I find, I prefer to play the piano than actually sit down transcribing what I play. No matter.

The other point is that, there is a difference between the safe things I play in public (ie the things I can’t possibly make a truly ridiculous mess of) and the things that I challenge myself with at home (Ballade No 2 by Chopin). I am thinking that perhaps, this needs to change.

Top 10 piano concertos right now

Rachmaninov – Piano Concerto No 2
Saint Saens – Piano Concert NO 5 (Egypt)
Beethoven – Piano Concerto No 5 (Emperor)
Grieg – Piano Concerto in A minor
Hummel – Piano Concerto no 3
Brahms Piano Concerto no 2
Liszt Piano Concerto no 2
Paderewski – Piano Concerto in A minor
Tchaikovsky – Piano Concerto no 2
Poulenc – Concerto for 2 pianos

This list changes all the time. All the time.

Music to inspire – Valse Fantaisie

The National Symphony Orchestra in Ireland have a regular season of concerts during the winter months all of which are generally broadcast live on a Lyric FM. If you’re familiar with World Concert Hall, it’s usually linked from there on the date of broadcast. One day earlier this year, I was a bit late tuning in, much to my chagrin and disorganisation, and missed pretty much most of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto (the single most popular piece of music over the life of Classic FM’s Hall of Fame). The soloist was not one I knew, but he was good enough to do an encore. He played a cheerful sounding short piece which I liked very much, so I went doing some investigating. It transpired his name was name was Vyacheslav Gryaznov. The piece was Italian Polka, and it was his own transcription. I liked it very much and I searched some more and came across a transcription he did of Glinka’s Valse Fantaisie. I thought it was fantastic.

I also figured it was going to be challenging. It is for various reasons. But it is also glorious. I love the opening chords. I love the fact that I have to work very hard at playing parts of it, in places because it is a big stretch for me. I know all about the dangers of short fingers – after all, I’ve tried and failed to play the opening chords of Rach 2m (but I don’t care. I still do it). But there is something very passionate about the opening few bars. I can play them ad infinitum on the odd occasion that I have free time enough to do it.

I ordered the music almost immediately – it is published by Schott who have an online shop – and it makes me happy that it is up on the piano. I have a lot of sheet music – and I will possibly never get to play all of it in my life.

But still.

Every once in a while, something comes along and punches you in the gut and says “this is what you want to be”. In a way that no other piece of music ever has, this piece did that. It isn’t awe inspiring in the way that Rach 2 is – it’s awe inspiring in the way it simply makes you want to play.

The Royal Irish Academy inflicted some Bartok and Kabelevsky on me when I was a teenager. I’ve never really forgiven them for that because I found both of them really unappealing and I didn’t have much room for manoeuvre on that front. I’ve often wondered how things would have been if I got more Mozart and Chopin as a teenager than a Pentatonic Tune that wrecked my head when I was about 14. And I would have loved to come across some of what Vyacheslav Gryaznov has done now, if only to be inspired to keep going.

Heuston Station, Dublin

This is the piano in Heuston Station, Dublin. It is one of three station pianos that I know about in Dublin (the first was in Pearse Station, and I believe there is one in Connolly Station now also).

I love the idea of pianos like that. The SNCF has a load of them in the train stations in Paris – I’ve played two of them. Most of the time that I pass through Heuston now, which is not very often as I live in Luxembourg, someone is playing the piano. The day I played (see below), a couple of teenage girls knocked out a lot of Yann Tiersen after I went off to get coffee.

The pianos in railway stations seem to survive remarkably well. The piano at the Gare de l’Est in Paris is a Yamaha which, by the standards of Yamahas, is a really nice piano to play. We often hear comments like “That’s why we can’t have nice things” when something has been vandalised but a million people must walk through some of the big stations in Paris and yet….

Trip to Ireland, Bensusan, arranged for piano by me

In Ireland, people come up and talk to you. They even came to me on the train in Mallow, 2 hours to the south to say that they had enjoyed it. I wasn’t doing anything particularly difficult – the piano is a piano d’études, and not very new. The keys are a little harder to play than I am used to. But if it’s free, I play it any time I pass, although I don’t always have time to record it. And I play things that are second nature.

Eamon an Chnoic, also known as Ned of the Hill

Cé hé sin amuigh, atá báite fuar, fliuch.

Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto

Mostly, if you ask me what my favourite piece of piano music is, I will most likely answer Rach 2. It’s a wonderful piece of music and I love it. No matter how bad things are the second movement will give solace to my soul. The opening chords are extraordinary, and my hands are unable to play all of them. The arrival of the orchestra changes the colour of the world. There is no other piece of music quite like this, not even any of Rachmaninoff’s other works although the Rhapsody comes close.

This is my piano site. It has had a hard birth but it is here now. I intend to use it as an honest broker in my new world of piano.