It is a hard call how to review a year in which nothing much was planned, at least not initially, and yet, which seems to have been highly productive.
I started 2023 at near 0. I’ve been playing the piano since I was 8 years old and while I rarely played during the 20 years I didn’t have a piano, I have had a piano for most of the last 6 years now and was playing reasonably regularly if not too much of the challenging stuff. I bought some music in Germany but it’s only since I moved to Brussels that I actually seriously started buying stuff I want to learn.
I’ve never felt I fit quite into the online world of piano. I spent some time as a gold subscriber to Piano Street; I really did not get on with Piano World at all. I questioned my right to call myself a pianist at times. During Covid, I moved from Luxembourg where I played concerts to Brussels where I don’t play concerts. In the background, work was extremely busy and plans I had to go back to university to do a masters in European integration were consistently kiboshed by the absolute certainty that I would miss lectures, and that I was simply too tired to work around work, lectures, assignments, all these things which are fixed in time. Which brings us to April.
I think it was April. Maybe it was not. Anyway, university ruled itself out again, I took a long hard look at the calendar and started thinking about the difference between what I should do and what I would want to do and realised that they were starting to diverge. What I wanted was to get better at playing the piano, start facing into some of the classical repertoire I hadn’t touched since I was 16 years old and learn to play some things like one of the Mendelssohn Gondola songs. I was ambitious too, so you could say I was foolhardy. I wanted to learn stuff that I heard Alexandre Tharaud play. I mean, I would love to play Chopinata but while I was foolhardy, I wasn’t really that stupid. But I went to a Chopin concert with someone in March and on the agenda was Sonata number 3. I have always loved it since I heard it on an Evgeny Kissin album when I was about 21 years old. The someone said he thought the second movement should be possible.
So I started thinking about lessons, and if I wanted to do lessons, I needed to be able to explain my objectives in some sort of rational manner rather than Hey, I wanna play a Chopin sonata. I decided to take a look at the grade repertoire and see if it had improved since I was 15. RIAM wise, no. ABRSM though, it had a list a mile long for each grade, and they had performance grades which meant I could spend time learning to play music rather than being terrified by how awful the sight reading test would be. Yes, past traumas were coming out. Anyway.
Performance grades. That could be recorded and submitted. But I would have to do Grade 5 Theory first.
So I did, and in August, I got a distinction in it. Congratulations me.
When I started looking at the grades, the initial point was to target Grade 8. When I looked at it though, I realised that actually, if what I wanted to do was grease my ego, I would probably want to target the diplomas as well. This made for a big project so now, for the next 10 years, I’m working towards FRSM. And one of the pieces I have lined up for the FRSM is that 3rd Chopin sonata. For 2024, I will need to decide what I need to do about teaching. I’m starting the grades with grade 6 and while I can probably manage that alone, the truth is I will need a regular teacher really soon. For 2024, the objective is to find a teacher who can teach me outside my working hours.
In the meantime, I’m working on some Bach, some Mendelssohn, some Rebikov, and some Milne, the latter being some what jazzy. I intend to do that sometime early in 2024 – my schedule in the second half of 2023 fell apart so while the Mendelssohn is on the cusp of being finished, the Bach is not because I have some issues with counterpoint. So this is behind the big schedule. I have very little time at the piano.
But there’s a great sense of achievement in managing even what I managed. For most of 2022, I didn’t play at all, so already…things are good.
In addition to my own digital Kawai, I have now access to rehearsal rooms with a beautiful Steinway B. In practical terms, things are good. I’m working on exam pieces, all of which I like, and the sight reading is improving however slowly. Next year I will start learning something by my beloved Rachmaninoff, not in C minor mind, but D flat minor.
In other news, I met Evgeny Kissin, the first concert pianist who truly blew my mind (I knew others, I knew William Kempff, I knew Julius Katchen. I knew Tamas Vasary). He played Rachmaninoff, and still did a meet and greet. The concert was life changing. I met Vikingur Olafsson, who is probably the best concert pianist in the world at the moment. His Goldbergs are sublime and so is his Rameau album. If I were to recommend one album for a newbie, it would be his Rameau album.
I also listened to a couple of talks by Boris Giltburg, also playing Rachmaninoff. Those sessions were fabulous and I am sorry I did not get to go to his other two performances in November.
On the digital services point of view, I signed up for Tonebase, and listen into the lectures regularly. I signed up for Tonic but would prefer that to pick up bluetooth as I often practice late at night and so, by definition, headphones are required. I also bought some piano instruments for Pianoteq and love how they sound when I play. I tend to emulate a Steinway D or a C Bechstein concert grand. I would like them to model Fazioli pianos and then my life would truly be complete. I also finally put sheet music software, namely Henle Digital Library, forScore and imslp, on my iPad. The last thing I kind of need is a page turner.
I played a concert again, possibly the last for a while. But done, nonetheless, and with a lot less of the panic and nerves compared to the first concert a few years ago.
In terms of music I discovered this year, I came across The Cyclops by Rameau when looking for something for Grade 8. I’m also interested in bits of Liszt’s B minor Sonata. But to see what I came across this year, it’s worth looking at the Sheet Music Category. I need to learn some of this stuff. I’ve looked at some Rachmaninoff, I’ve looked at some more Bach (easy stuff). I bought the Anna Maria notebook because Barenreiter did a Jubilee edition. I heard someone say at some point that you should work on your weaknesses, and for me, Baroque really is. Bach is mathematical, so he should work for me, although he doesn’t. Let’s change that.
I read two piano focused books, one of which I did not like, one of which was engaging. I bought myself another copy of the Piano Shop on the Left Bank.
For 2024, I have some ideas and some plans. On the main objective side, there are two primary KPIs:
- Take and pass Grade 6 Performance with ABRSM
- Start the Grade 8 pieces.
After that, I have some ideas. I put together an instragram account which has been neglected. The fact that I cannot embed videos from there is infuriating. I’m considering setting up a YouTube channel. I’m not a virtuoso, and I have gaps in my knowledge. But I like things like the 1 minute 10 minutes 1 hour challenge that Annique Gottler does. And I have ideas for sight reading challenges, and occasional live streams. I’ve livestreamed from the Steinway rehearsal room once and found technical glitches. So this will require some planning.
I am also looking at some of the intermediate repertoire recommended through Tonebase, and one of the items which popped up today was Raindrops by Chopin. I occasionally sight read Chopin but there isn’t anything my repertoire so that’s an idea. After that, I want to look at some of the other pieces from my learning list.
I also want to learn some bits of a couple of piano concertos. I love the opening phrase of Beethoven 5, for example. And I used to be able to play a chunk of Grieg and Rach II. I’m hoping that as I get better, more chunks of all three become accessible.
We’ll see. 2023 was unexpectedly fruitful when I made that sudden decision to take this much more seriously. I hope 2024 gives me the change to finish the Grade 6 pieces and make inroads to the grade 8 pieces.