It’s been a while since I’ve been practising, sadly. When I got to Hamburg I had not played in about 3 weeks. But I am getting back there this week and what am I working on.
Liszt Consolation Number 2. This is a gorgeous piece of Accessible Liszt for which the left hand starts on a half between the first and second beat. It’s not a polyrhythm but I am finding it a bit counter intuitive. There are moments it comes right for me and I think god, how can I create something so beautiful, and then there are moments it does not.
Rameau Les Cyclopes. I love this and the first page of it is mostly a joy to work with. It’s not listenable (sorry to my Tonic stream audience) as a performance yet as there is a pesky arpeggio in it which must surely have been easier on a harpsichord. So this is very much the subject of slow practice and I need to start putting time in on metronome practice with arpeggios in general.
Repertoire: I keep practising three of the pieces I did for Grade 6 as they are appropriate for, inter alia, playing Steinways in piano stores. Those pieces were by Mendelssohn, Rebikov and CPE Bach. CPE Bach does not work most mornings for some reason and yet it’s the one I use to warm up mostly.
Sight reading: this week I took two pieces from the issue of Pianist sitting on my piano (well one of them =- I have two). It’s the August-September Edition and the two pieces were:
- Aria by Antonio Fragoso. He was a young composer when he died – 1897 to 1918 so this is basically late Romanticish. It’s a pretty piece in Gminor which makes extensive use of the sustain pedal. Worth a look if you are looking for sightreading practice. Pianist marked it Intermediate
- Eastern Promise by Melanie Spanswick. This is in A Minor with one or two rhythm tests in it for all that it is a short piece. Again, good sightreading practice if this is a weak point you are trying to fix.
Neither of these pieces are on my 40 pieces challange which has pretty much fallen apart. With 4 months left in the year, I will need to scale that done and reassess how I manage it as a project for next year (or I could star the project a new this week which which case I am 5% in. I will reflect on that the next time I am staring out the window of a bus. At some point, I need to write a bit on sight reading, how I feel about it, and what I want to be able to do.
I did no scales this week. I am a very bad person.