April 2024 – Concerto in C Minor

30042024 Practice Diary

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.

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.

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

Noteworthy releases to come later this year

Warner Classics{I think, at least} and Alexandre Tharaud have been pushing tasters of his upcoming four hands album. This week it was the single with Vikingur Olafsson, some Grieg. This album is absolutely worth your time. There is also a brilliant single with Bruce Liu with one of the Hungarian dances. Definitely worth following Alexandre Tharaud’s instagram to keep an eye out for this. The man is criminally under-rated internationally.

Another interesting recording which hasn’t actually been made yet but which is in the pipeline is Medtner No 1 with the Belgian National Orchestra, soloist Florian Noack. As I speak, he should be in Lyon ready to play it; I heard it in Brussels Bozar last night. It was mesmerising. Noack I have been aware of for his transcriptions so assumed I should get to see him sooner or later once I relocated to Brussels. Here I am and yes I did. The performance last night was fantastic, and you can listen to it on Musiq3 here for about the next year if you want.

That being said, the record of the year is still looking to be Trifonov and Babayan but who knows how it will turn out.

20240421 Practice Journal

I didn’t practice at all for the last days. It’s the longest I’ve gone without sitting at the piano since sometime in December, and I’d like to say I have good reasons. But “good” is subjective.

On the plus side, I did buy a tripod for the camera, and some sort of a mic which will probably struggle with the sound of a piano. I did that 7 days ago.

For myself, I’m sorry. I’ve been tired, and I’ve been getting home late from work. And I’ve been wondering what the point is about this and a lot of other things. I’m tired of online discussions about the piano – many of them seem to be either far too superficial (Is this piece of Rach too hard for me; I can’t sightread) or too deep.

I’m tired of YouTube. It’s got fantastic stuff hidden away but what it is pushing is utter crap about self improvement. I’m wondering if it is worth the monthly subscription I spend. It probably is because instagram’s sponsored posts are running at around 2/3rds of what they push to me. It certainly isn’t what I have followed.

I’m very close to being ready to submit the Grade 6. I have no idea how that will go either because I made the bad mistake of reading piano teachers asking if it was really necessary to comply with the instructions of ABRSM around being able to see the pedal – I’m sorry but I am not a piano teacher, I don’t have one, but I really cannot see why you’d even ask this question? ABRSM went to the trouble of recording a video for you.

So I need to go back to practice and see how that goes. I had started June by Tchaikovsky (although one of his nocturnes is around distracting me at the moment – I need to check if it is in any of the music books I own. Could be.

I will get to the piano shortly – I will set up the tripod then and we might see abut a youtube video later. Anyway. Have a good week. I have a couple of other pieces to write so this practice failure on my part might not be very noticeable to my 1 or 2 readers.

20240414 Practice Diary

All those lovely fours.

Okay. Hands up. It was not a good week on the practice front this week and although I haven’t looked, I’m assuming I dropped out of my Sapphire league this week. I missed yesterday so my continuous streak broke as well.

CPE Bach got most practice. It’s almost ready to go and as an additional bonus, I bought a tripod and for my next trick will be working out how best to record the exam film.

Apart from that, I did touch on the Tchaik a bit and that was about it.

There isn’t much to be said really. My bad.

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….

Whither piano exams

During the week I found out that there was an ABRSM group of some description on FaceBook so I took a look in. It was a weird experience, but I wanted to touch briefly on some of the discussions I saw in there. Somewhat surprisingly, there are people who do not like the performance grades.

They think they are too easy and exams are a waste of time.

The discussion I read during the week was sad. One primary push from certain of the contributors was that in the old days it was harder, and the exams were more of an achievement. And that ABRSM only does things for the money. And the exams are meaningless. And if you don’t have to do sight reading or aural or rhythm tests they were just too easy and no one was doing exams any more.

I’m going to be honest. ABRSM should roll back the decision to only issue digital certificates by default. The exams are not exactly cheap but I doubt the diplomas are the biggest problem. That aside, what do I think of it?

Well, these graded systems are really a feature of the British world, and mostly pervade countries that were under British rule when these things were getting off the ground. This explains, for example, why the US is clueless about this sort of stuff but Canada, Ireland and Australia all have parallel systems and because no other countries really do it, if people want them, they tend to ABRSM and TCL. ABRSM is, I understand, especially popular in South East Asia.

What I found infuriating about the discussion is that one of the loudest voices against the performance grades and doing exams in general now Argued From Authority and the authority they argued from was having done all the ABRSM and TCL diplomas. I mean, have they no idea how utterly privileged they are? Most people haven’t time to do all the grades, never mind the grades and the diplomas of two examining bodies? Why would you do ABRSM’s top diplomas if you already had the TCL ones? And vice versa?

In practical terms, I’ve already written about how annoying it was to be forced to do pieces I hated (side eye to RIAM in the 1980s). Once you get to grade 6 onwards, I’m not sure you can actually progress without being reasonably competent in side reading, aural understanding, rhythm tests and some basic theory. That extra piece is a good chunk of work. Being told it’s worthless by someone who implies the whole thing was harder in the past (but easy.cheap and accessible enough for them to do both strands) is utterly insulting. It also doesn’t really deal with the key points here. What are people’s motivations?

What was this person’s motivation to do both FRSM and FTCL? What on earth does their business card look like?

Why does it matter more than mine? I got up in April and said “I regret not completing to Grade 8 when I was a teenager. The only other thing still possible is book writing, the dream of an Olympic figure skating gold was always out the window).

What was their motivation when it all comes down to it, if all they do is belittle the motivations of other people, run down their achievements and then boast they did it all and more anyway?

It must be very sad.

20240406 Practice Diary

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.