Month: September 2024

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.

20240922 Random notes

Couple of things to note:

Daniil Trifonov has a new album due next month and Apple Music is already streaming a couple of tracks from it. I can’t find his recording of it on YouTube but definitely worth checking out his recording of China Gates by John Adams. You’ll find other recordings of that piece on YouTube including by Yuja Wang (the piece is currently on my TBL list which is almost longer than my reading list). The other thing to take a look at is this:

Daniil Trifonov When I Fall in Love

Very understated. I love it. He did the transcription and from what I can see, he doesn’t publish them. This is gorgeous though.

Also on Apple Music/Apple Music Classical, Deutsche Grammophon have been good enough to curate a bunch of playlists. If you’ve any interest in classical music at all, it’s worth looking through them and my particular recommendation is their Piano Masters list which includes Yuja Wang’s rendition of Philip Glass’s Etude 6. It’s worth taking a look around their other play lists as they have some good composer specific lists.

Yuja Wang playing Etude 6 by Philip Glass

I haven’t listened to it yet but Ben Laude, late of ToneBase but now doing nice stuff on his own channel, was interviewed for Behind the Tech, which is a tech podcast. You can find a taster here:

Ben Laude taster of interview with Kevin Scott

They talk extensively about Scriabin’s Opus 8 number 12 which is to be fair, a great piece of music. I came across it on Boris Giltburg’s Instagram channel. In particular, they discuss Horowitz’s playing of said piece but personally I like Garrick Ohlsson’s recording and Daniil Trifonov played it on at a Yellow Room concert for Deutsche Grammophon and it’s definitely worth you time too.

God plays Scriabin

I see there’s a Nikolai Lugansky version as well. I must check it out at some point.

I want to learn this but it will have to be for the LRSM I guess, feel sure it would be acceptable difficulty wise. Annique Gottler had a go at it here. She said it was hard and she definitely is better than I am atm.

In other news, the Leeds Piano Competition has been running. Jaeden Izik-Dzurko won in the end and you can find his Brahms II concerto final here. I also recommend taking a lot at the second placed Junwan Chen’s Rachmaninoff 4 if and when it’s been posted. I don’t see it there yet. The competition’s YouTube is worth an exploration though so find it here.

Last two things to mention: Alexandre Tharaud has a Bach release on the way, again check it out on your streaming service of choice as a couple of tracks are already available and my little piece of joy to listen to from Vikingur Olafsson is the Bach No 4 Organ Sonata, transcribed by Stradal. It looks like IMSLP is the main source for the sheets. I hope that link eventually takes you to the right place.

Here he is on YouTube with a rather sobering video.

20240922 Practice Diary

It’s sobering to think that we are almost at the end of September. We’re passing the midpoint where the days are longer than the nights and soon, winter will be here. It’s well dark by the time half past eight rolls around in the evening. In Brussels, however, we have a little more warmth than we could have expected; it’s been 24 degrees most days this last week.

But I have been practising. Not so much sight reading because I haven’t pieces set up to be reading. If I ever have time to do this, I’d like to put together a sequence of pieces that you can find in IMSLP, create a giant pdf of all those pieces and share it as a sight reading resource. So, no major updates. No new Felix Le Couppey, for example. It’s a pity but I have a new copy of PIaniste at least so there should be some material there for me to take a look at in the coming few days.

So, on to what I’ve been doing this week which is mostly, Les Cyclopes by Jean-Philippe Rameau. There is something quite compelling about practising this (let’s not call what I inflict on the piece anything as positive as “playing it”. In summary this is:

  • 50% memorised
  • 100% read-through
  • End to End playable
  • with a lot of errors.

This piece has some interesting challenges, namely some leaps that I am sure are much much easier on the harpsichord than on the piano. There is also some what I call syncopation but probably has a different technical term somewhere along the line. These have been the biggest challenges. For the second lot of syncopation, I have given this many hours of my life. I will die early because of this but I can only say it would make the other two rounds easier (which it did). This piece, these few bars, when I get them right, it is a source of complete shock to me, so much so that it knocks me out of kilter for the oncoming express train of left hand leaps. I find them infuriating because they are not hard as such; they are harmonically logical, I listen to 8 different recordings of this and they are all in my ear, But my brain glitches. On this YouTube short you can see a lot of evidence of the errors and the glitches.

Opening part of Les Cyclopes, JP Rameau as murdered by Treasa

The thing is, I didn’t expect to be at this stage with any of the four pieces by now. In particular, given that I had such a complete failure with a Bach invention last year (but not with his son’s Solfeggio), I expected this to take me until about March next year. But I expect to be polishing this sooner rather than later provided I miss no practice for the next six weeks (I will lose half of November and most of December so I will have delays anyway).

That being said; listening to the recording has been helpful; it feels a lot faster playing it than it sounds when I listen back. I’m also not happy with the expression but there, I don’t have a lot of guidance. The pieces, originally written for harpsichord have no dynamic markings but the low Ds are eventually quite marcato courtesy of the need to jump well over an octave angling upwards. I’m not alone on this – you can listen to almost any recording of the piece on piano except maybe Grigory Sokolov.

The recordings vary in length from 2 minutes forty five to over four minutes which indicates there’s a wide variation in thinking around the pace of the piece. I don’t see the need to aim for the fastest rendition of it – I’m not sure I could cleanly get all of the scaled or arpeggiated sections, the later of which turn up 2 via the repeats as do the scales which are somewhat faster again. When I play this I want it to be crisp and clean. Close observers will acknowledge there’s quite a bit of work to be done on that front at least. I also want to see about playing this on an acoustic piano soon just to get a feel for avoiding mud. I play this without pedals and I haven’t seen any reason to change that yet. Need really to memorise it though because frankly, the page turns are killing me.

I’ve been practising up to 2 hours days this week and that’s mostly been the Cyclopes so for the other pieces, there isn’t a whole pile to report. I don’t have stats to back this up but I think the piece that got most attention beside Rameau was Reverie by Claude Debussy. I only started it last week so really very early stages here. I’m struggling to memorise it but find it remarkably easy to read (so far at least). The Edition Peters issue which I am learning from has 5 pages and let’s say I’m about 20% of the way through that for play through. The page turn from 1 to 2 isn’t really all that pleasant tbh so I’m going to take a look at the Henle edition of it which I think is on my iPad (if not, it will be very shortly after the iPad is charged).

For the Rachmaninoff and the Liszt, they have not received a lot of attention; neither got played at all today but get at least touched. For the Liszt, I am not very happy with how I play some of page one – it’s not the fireworksist fireworks that Franz has been able to offer the discerning and uniquely talented with more time to practise than I, but it has its challenges in terms of ensuring a legato sound (I feel that Claude has some unpleasant surprises in store here too) and I’d like to smooth those transitions over. Even the pedal isn’t able to hide the lack of cantabile which afflicts me here. If I’ve feeling brave, I may record/publish some of those efforts next week, but only if I am feeling brave and can drag myself away from JP Rameau, mercurial 18th century love of my life at the moment.

For Rachmaninoff, the approach here is very much more slow because as is his wont, it’s in D flat which is totally not my favourite key in the whole world. My target is to get the first 8 bars under control sometime soon, again, I will need to cheat on JP Rameau to do that but since I want to be able to submit an exam sometime next year, it’s going to have to be done.

In the background, I continue to play Mendelssohn 19b/6 and SPE Bach Solfeggietto regularly with the occasional visit to Rebikov, all of which I would like to keep in my repertoire. It’s not consistently successful but I do find it good to finish off a practice session with one of the three of them so that I can finish on a reasonably high note as opposed to misery caused by mercurial French composers down the years.

20240914 Sightreading Log

Okay, I see the last time I updated this was 5 September. So I hope I haven’t missed too much here.

I started getting systematic about this. I now write the dates I have played a piece next to the sheet music I’ve been using. This week that’s mostly been Pianiste 142. I have to thank the French piano magazine for this because for issue 142, the included a Spécial Débutants, 20 pieces in progressing difficulty.

8 September 2024:

  • Daniel Gottlob Turk: Aller Anfang is schwer GD
  • Daniel Gottlob Turk: O geschwinder, geschwinder rund herum, wie die Kinder GD

9 September 2024

  • Daniel Gottlob Turk: Hansohne Sorgen GD
  • Daniel Gottlob Turk: Eye, popeya GD
  • Jakub Jan Ryba: 2 little inventions Moderato GD
  • Jakub Jan Rybe: 2 little inventions AndanteGD
  • Henry Purcell: Andante GD

11 September 2024

  • Johan Wilhelm Hassler: Menuetto Opus 38 GD
  • Felix Le Couppey Air Tendre [this felt familiar so not sure when I met it] GD
  • Jean Philippe Rameau Menuet en rondeau B
  • Georg Friedrich Handel: Gavotte B

12 September 2024

  • Robert Schumann: Petite piece B
  • Samuel Maykapar: Miniature opus 83 no 1 B
  • Ludwig van Beethoven: Danse Allemande BI

14 September 2024

  • Robert Fuchs: le Fier Cavalier BI
  • Friedrich Burgmuller: Le Courant limpide (first part) BI

Total number for this week, apparently:

15.5

It’s not a bad haul for the week, let’s be fair. I liked the Burgmuller in particular so will finish that tomorrow and may move it to repertoire acquisition.

Of the pieces concerned, some were extremely easy for me. I want to say insultingly easy but I know there are a lot of adult beginners around and we all started somewhere. I’m not doing this because I am brilliant at sight reading either – I’m here because I am not. I want to be able to read intermediate pieces effectively and there are sometimes no magic bullets You have to read and practice. This is why I am doing so many pieces I consider to be easy.

The Pianiste Magazine tutorial channel is here.

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.

Morning Piano

This week I have had five minutes for the piano before I left the house to go to work. It’s autumn and the morning light is changing. And I am working on Consolation No 2 by Liszt.

Normally I’m not sure about only giving this five minutes in the morning but it truly makes the morning beautiful when those notes fall into place. I love it.

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.

20240902 Practice Diary

Oh god they have changed the interface a bit again. I hope I manage to be able to post stuff in the future.

Okay, the practice stuff, I am trying to get back under control. To this end, I wish I could read music more efficiently.

So, currently I am working on two pieces – Consolation No 2 by Franz Liszt and Les Cyclopes by JP Rameau. It’s tough being back at the start of the journey, although to be fair, if I had actually not taken a chunk of July and August off, I’d not be at the start. I hope, at least I would not be at the start.

I love both pieces but they both in the early stages have some challenges which I am struggling with. As I spent more time with Franz Liszt, the original rock and roll superstar, let’s start there.

Liszt Consolation 2
Consolation No 2, Liszt, opening measures

Strictly speaking, this is entry level Liszt. Compared to some of his other fireworks, this is reasonably approachable. I draw the line at calling it easy but there is nothing overly shocking here. No polyrhythms for example. But those quaver rests in red are causing me undue difficulty when trying to put these bars hands together. It’s not a straight rhythm problem either because the bars with the squares around them are not posing the same problem for some reason. I understand what they should sound like, I’m not struggling to read them but I am struggling to coordinate them. Even being mangled and interpersed with assorted swearwords, the piece is beautiful. So I don’t intend to give up (and given there is Rachmaninoff and Ravel to come afterwards, I hope this all works out.

I have doing some reading of the pages to come – I can see I will have similar issues but hands swapped. I hope it goes okay – that the click turns up soon.

For the Rameau, it’s mostly okay. The challenge here is memorisation and speed with one or two things for which I will need to spend a lot of time with arpeggios.

Rameau Les Cyclopes Extract
Les Cyclopes by Rameau, opening measures

I just cannot play the circles bars fast enough. So slow practice and arpeggios are the name of the game. Also, I’d like a new piano stool as the one I have isn’t really stable enough for my liking. The highlighted pieces I love playing.

Currently I am also sight reading all the beginner pieces I can find in assorted issues of Pianist magazine. So since I last spoke, what I have done are:

  • Minuet in F by Christian Gottlob Neefe, one of LvB’s teachers. This was not all that difficult and I recommend it.
  • The Echo No 14 from Mayflowers, Op 61 by Theodor Oesten, from Berlin direction. Pianist has a lesson from M Spanswick for this if you have access via Pianist. Issue 139
  • No 17 from ABC du Piano by Felix Le Couppey from issue 136

All three of these were from today’s practice session. I tend to focus on the pieces which means I’m not doing enough work on the technique side of things. I’d like to be better at reading so I am working through all the beginner stuff and then intermediate stuff that I have in Pianist.

Scales we have loved this week: E major.

Repertoire Management: yes I played 3/4 Grade 6 pieces.

I was listening on Tonic today and I heard someone working on Hanon 31. I like the sound of it. Additionally, Annique Goettler has a tutorial on Hanon 1 on her YouTube channel.

Annique Goettler on Hanon