I targeted April (revised after missing most of November and December) for the exam recording and while the switcheroo from JS to CPE Bach made me consider that a delay was likely, I’m not certain that it will be. I’m now starting to play Mendelssohn reasonably cleanly, I regularly get Rebikov cleanly (although when it goes badly wrong, it’s a spectacular disaster near the end) and I can play the Milne cleanly albeit not yet from memory. People who hear that seem to like it a lot. And then there’s the CPE Bach bit. I can’t play it cleanly yet, but it’s 95% in memory, is playing okayish at a low speed. There are shaky bits near the end – about 4 bars – and after that, it’s going to be a long journey with a metronome to bring it up to performance tempo. I do a lot of work with a metronome for this. I never got his father’s piece even close to this level. I am not in the mood to analyse why.
The week and a half, nearly two weeks, was odd. I was travelling so lost 3 days completely. One day got 20 minutes in Amsterdam Airport where I was too self conscious to play the classical pieces so it hardly counts for exam purposes.
For some time, and more sustained than usual, I’ve been playing when I come in from work, minimum 20 minutes, often longer. 90 minutes if I can. The Bachs have often accounted for a lot of that time. There’s something really nice about coming in, sitting at the piano and forgetting about computers, policy and applications. Today, I put about 45 minutes to CPE Bach, learning the last gaps so that I start the gluing process. It took fifteen minutes to achieve my objectives for the other three pieces together. They are, admittedly, short pieces but usually, they take about 30 minutes. So here I was, an hour in to practice with time. I haven’t had time on a practice for ages.
So I read through Reverie by Debussy which is scheduled for Grade 8. I’ll be chunking it, of course I will. But the RH is accessible. I’ve now read through two of the pieces and, in line with plans, I will probably start learning one of them even before I’ve done the grade 6 test.
I did something else but it’s going to get an entry on its own shortly. All told, the last few days have been good.