I’m listening to a programme on the place of the piano in Irish traditional music, which for me is a contentious issue, and this has not started well to be honest as it’s focused on piano as an accompaniment.
But that’s not why I am here. I got a delivery of music this morning and of course there are the more recent acquisitions in bricks and mortar shops here i Brussels and in Strasbourg as well.
Karl Ekman arrangement of Passacaglia
Wege zu Franz Liszt
Czerny 599 because I don’t have it and I am not disciplined about doing these kinds of exercises.
Saint Saens – 6 Etudes pour piano OP 52
Schuman Carnaval op 9 – Wiener Urtext
Glinka-Balakirev – the Lark
Schubert-Liszt 13 songs in transcriptions
Jean Sibelius Opus 76 nr 2
Clara Schumann – Romantic Piano Music including Opus 16
It’s 17 December. I suppose I should have done this a few weeks ago. Sorry about that.
Anyway, there are just a few ideas to think about if you are stuck. I’ve no handy pictures. When I do this next year I’ll do it better.
A piano
Most pianists already own a piano but if you are a multibillionaire with a nice big house, then Steinway Ds or Faziolis are always popular. If you are not wealthy and your pianist already has some sort of piano, then the chances are this is not your market segment.
Lego do have a grand piano model which is several hundred euro worth of bricks. You may want to consider it.
Annique Gottler has a grand piano model on a shelf in her studio. I covet it. I have no idea what it is but as she is a Boston ambassador I’m going to guess it might come from Steinway.
Sheet music
The safest bet here are vouchers for your pianist’s sheet music dealer of choice. There may be several. Credit for Henle Digital is always useful too but difficult to do in secret.
The cotton hardback editions of Rach and Bach are an attractive addition to any bookshelf. I don’t recommend Bartok in any shape or form. If your pianist is a teenager, consider books of computer games music as well.
But vouchers. Vouchers are always possible
Concert tickets
Or vouchers. Most concert halls do them. Vikingur Olafsson’s Goldbergs are the hit tour of the minute. Check out your local options or plan a trip to, say, Verbier, the Elbphilharmonie. Are they notably partial to a particular concert pianists like Martha Argerich or Danil Trifonov?
Verbier’s schedule is out on 15 Jan, and public sale starts on 29 Jan. Not sure what will be available but let’s put it this way. I would love to have been in the room for this.
Bach concerto for 4 pianos at Verbier in 2002
Metronomes
There are Metronome apps on both the Apple and Android stores. But there are battery operated little beauties (I bought one the other day) and then, your budget can cover a multitude with the Wittmer or antique ones. I’m conflicted between a turquoise or a ruby red little Wittmer. Ebay is full of antique wooden pyramids with brass fittings. If your pianist has a youtube channel, check their styling. A 19th century brass thing is going to look out of place in a cold modern black and white studio.
Digital Services and online teaching
You can get lifetime subs to ToneBase and Josh Wright Piano. I’m not going to recommend one over the other and these are high end gifts anyway. But there are some pianists who give private lessons on line lessons. Youtube premium for ad free watching of Garrick Ohlsson lectures might also be an option but that is a monthly commitment.
Absolutely anything which has a grand piano printed on it
Cups
Totebags
Scarves
Hats
Brief cases
Stickers for their laptop
Notebooks. The Beethoven Paperblanks is still knocking around in a few shops. I regret missing the Chopin and Schubert ones.
Earrings and other jewellery
Rulers
Pens
Blue print of a Steinway
Books such as The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, The Lost Pianos of Siberia.
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.
I’m way behind in a couple of things but it is Friday evening, Sebastien Dupuis is streaming some Liszt practice. I’m ashamed to say I play no Liszt so I picked up a book of easy Liszt (for a given value of easy, when Liszt is at play) today. I didn’t deliberately intend to do that, but there you go.
I was in Strasbourg this week which means two main things: another shop to visit selling sheet music and stuff, and I didn’t practice at all. It’s safe to say I am now awfully behind with the whole Grade 6 things and it is frustrating to say the least.
I’m behind in photographing and uploading books and sheet music, although on the sheet music front, it’s just Strasbourg and Brussels.
On the book front, I bought another lot of Notes Legeres, a biography of Clara Schumann = still looking for one particular piece of music by her. I also bought a book galled Guide de la Musique de Piano which intrigued me and there is, somewhere around my book collection a copy of the letters. All of this is in French. The dtv-Atlas Musik came from Trier – not sure I mentioned that.
On the sheet music front, I bought a couple of bits and pieces. I bought the Wiener Urtext of Schumann’s Carnival. I bought some studies by Camille Saint Saens, and I’m sure there was something else, oh yes The Lark by Glinka-Balakirev. Here in Brussels, I bought a Handel Passacaglia arranged for piano and now I am hoping it is the “right” Passacaglia. I’m not sure it is which is going to be challenging (but that’s what Reddit support is for). I will take a look at that later. I also bought 599 Czerny as the in-the-knows on Reddit bang on about it and I have never done very much technique work.
So yeah, I need to catch up with photographing all that stuff and maybe updating the piano sheet music and literature library.
36 hours of Leif Ove Andsnes. Definitely worth your time
I love listening to Leif Ove Andsnes. I especially love his Rach and his Sib. But this is an interesting selection and the Nielsen album is something I want to listen to in a little more detail. I somehow missed that this was coming out.
I was in Trier for the first time in a few years at the weekend. It was a great weekend and since it was Trier I took the opportunity to visit two grail shops; one being Musikhaus Kessler, a place where I bought quite a lot of sheet music when I was living in Luxembourg. I also bought quite a few bits of music giftery – they are very good for that.
Anyway, my current music shopping list included the Sinding, already mentioned in previous entries, and Solfeggio by CPE Bach. I’ve since discovered that Solfeggio has previously been a Grade 6 piece for ABRSM (so I could have used it as the self selected piece for my currently stalled Grade 6 piece). It’s been mentioned a lot in r/piano and it sounds nice. So yeah, on the learning list it went, and also, not like everything on my learning list, it also made its way onto the sheet music shopping list. The Sinding was really more luck – they don’t have a lot of second hand stuff but that was there, and more importantly, this is the edition that was there; a lovely older imprint. I really wish Peters would use more beautifully engaged title pages again. I had been looking for this edition on Ebay (there were a few) but lo, here it was in my hands, and subject to being bought by my credit card. This made me happy. I haven’t started it yet although both pieces are sitting on my piano stand at the moment. This leaves only a piece of Sibelius, Opus 76.2 on my list. I don’t see many versions of it in print so I think I got it from IMSLP in the end. Incidentally, I signed up for them for a year because they are worth supporting. The current print version that I found on Stretta did not really appeal to me.
So I would like to accidentally find that too. I didn’t score on Ebay or AbeBooks yet.
The other grail shop – and I really do recommend it to anyone in the area who loves pianos – is Marcus Huebner Pianohaus. It’s about 5 minutes from the main railway station in Trier. It is a lovely piano shop, a major Steinway dealer, and the staff, and Marcus himself are really lovely people to talk to. The last time I was there (before this trip), they had two beautiful Model Ds out. This time, they had a couple of special editions, some Model Bs, some Model Os and a Model C. I played the two special editions. I tried to play one of the Bs but it was already reserved for someone and while it seems irrational, I never do well with pianos that I know are for someone else. It’s better if I don’t know.
The two special editions were a maquette Model O and a silver Model B. I spent a lot of time with the silver Model B and have to say, it’s a beautiful piano to play. It seems similarly priced to a new Model B so if the piano appealed to you and you have the money, the choice between silver and standard wouldn’t be driven by price.
The Model Os felt less light under my fingers, a little heavier. As they are a smaller piano, that would have surprised me. Nevertheless, the piano was a beauty to look at. There’s been the occasional debate of black versus not black – I have mixed feelings. It’s pretty much the case if I were buying a new piano, I would default to black polish. But for the older pianos from the earlier 20th century, the different wood casings are very attractive.
Steinway Model O, LE
I’m not currently in the market for a piano, although I am always in the market for a Steinway B when I have sorted out an apartment. So the question of whether I would go for the marquette casing is more or less moot. I very much appreciated the opportunity to play the piano though as I don’t often get the opportunity to play unusual pianos.
Marcus Huebner has also his own range of pianos and although I’ve played one in the past, there was not one on display last weekend. This is a pity. I’m privileged in that I have played one of his, and also one of Chris Maene’s straight strung pianos.
It’s lunchtime on a Saturday afternoon, and my flight has been delayed over an hour. There isn’t a piano here (CORK Airport in Ireland, hint hint) and I’ve already spent a chunk of time considering exciting philosophical discussions like, will I sign up for Josh Wright (well I just signed up for ToneBase, so do I need another one?) or, should I upgrade my digital piano? I’m about to sign up for more Pianoteq voices anyway. I’ve scrolled through r/piano, and I have idly considered looking at piano world. I have sheet music with me and because I haven’t been playing much, I haven’t been writing much about playing yet.
One of the items on my “Maybe Do List” is to build a YouTube channel to accompany the blog. It seems like madness, because I assume the only person who looks at this site much is myself. So I am thinking about that. But I’m not the kind of person who can build a viral video channel about the piano. You need to look at what I would be up against – there are a couple of very good sites with mediocre numbers – Sebastien Dupuis does great content but he’s not got the numbers of say a TwoSet or Denis Zhdanov. There’s a lot of audience for the synthesia and while I think it looks engaging, I can read music, and synthesia makes no sense to me. I love Annique Gottler’s One Minute Ten Minutes One Hour challenges – I think they are a great idea.
But hardly a unique selling point for Concerto in C Minor. I like a lot of the other teachers like LeCheile and Josh Wright too. Not such a fan of Jazer Lee. I’m also only a young/un if you are over the age of 60 and I’m never going to be a concert pianist (hold that thought…)
So my market segment would probably be the “Middle Aged Regretful Pianists Who Could Have been a Contender”.
I need to think about that of course. Put a mind map together, find a useful name for the channel that slips off the tongue. Do Shorts. Join TikTok although I’m not sure so many of old fogies are on TikTok. I might think about it when I am on the plane again.
While I was considering the Josh Wright angle this morning (Black Friday does this to you), I went looking for reviews of his premium offering (I’m in favour of life time offers) and came across a discussion on realistic aspirations and telling the vast majority of pianists they will never be a great concert pianist.
When you spend any time on the internet at all, you run into the whole idea of why people are motivated to do things. I see it with running, I see it with swimming. I don’t see it with knitting for reasons which remain unclear although it’s possible that there are other issues there if r/craftsnark is anything to go by.
The vast majority of people don’t really want to be concert pianists, I think, They want respect, adulation, if it’s going. But they are happy to come home, play a bit of Chopin and day dream. A lot of discussions around teaching/learning are not based on this reality. It’s based on the idea – especially for young people – that the only reason you would do this is for purely competitive reasons. Be a great concert pianist.
It’s not why I do it. I do it because I actively like playing. I mostly play at home, alone for escapism. If I am doing the ABRSM grades at the moment (and god is that going slowly for the time being), it’s not because I want to be a concert pianist. I have played piano in concerts. I have stage fright. My absolute zen place is playing a beautiful piano in an empty concert hall, which I do every once in a while. Everyone is different, I guess.
There’s an element of elitism around the discussion sometimes. I’m generally in favour of people learning to play the piano properly, like, using sheet music or their ears like God intended (I don’t have any truck with synthesia at all), but after that, if you want to play Jingle Bells, knock yourself out. It’s every bit as valid a motivation as Un Sospiro is.
There are a couple of people just streaming practice sessions – I’ve listened to a guy playing scales every night for a while. I don’t much like his camera set up but I like the idea that he uses this for accountability.
The vast majority of people who play the piano past the age of 18 are in it for reasons that cannot be summed up as “I want to be the next Yuja Wang”. Don’t get me wrong – some of them are exceptional pianists who have worked for years on their Liszt and Islamey if they are particularly masochistic – but being a concert pianist is a whole host of other things besides playing the piano. It is often, playing music you don’t much like. It is playing music that puts people in the auditorium. There is a whole administrative/costly side in terms of managing agents, record companies, tax liabilities, and your pianos. I sometimes think that gets forgotten.
You see it with sports too. We’re only interested in the ones who are winning races and yet humanity as a whole benefits hugely if we encourage people to get exercise throughout their lives without the added pressure of winning something. I honestly think the win at all costs attitude sucks. Every person benefits by going running if their frame is up to it, without the motivation of winning a race.
Anyway, I think the first thing we need to do is get people enjoying what they are doing, while being open to getting better all the time.
In other thoughts, I also happened across a weirdly common theme of whinging about Lang Lang (actually I need to check if I have written this bit before – it seems not).
I’ve seen Lang Lang in concert. He played the Chopin ballades and I think some preludes. It was a remarkable concert; he is a wonderfully talented pianist who takes an immense amount of pleasure in playing the piano. I was left with the impression that he considers it an immense privilege to be able to play and that people actively want to come and listen to him. What I consider to have been completely absent from his performance that night was any arrogance or undue showiness. I’ve seen the argument that he is an entertainer, not a musician. So let me put it this way: all professional musicians are entertainers. Daniel Barenboim – whom I have also seen in concert – is an entertainer.
They don’t earn money otherwise.
What I particularly appreciate about Lang Lang is that he places a massive amount of importance in enticing other people to play. It’s why he has a really well thought out sheet music collection for people who want to play the piano. It’s why he plays some wonderful music from Disney movies. I’m looking forward with interest to hearing how he handles Saint-Saens No 2 which is one of my favourite concertos.
The thing is he, and Yuja Wang, kind of stand out as the first great, great Chinese concert pianists. I sometimes wonder if they earn greater attention because they are not white men pianists from patrician backgrounds. You see it with women in general – often held to much higher standards purely for being women than corresponding men are. There is a famous study on recruiting women to orchestras.
Playing the piano is very much subjective. It’s for this reason I listen to several recordings now of any piece I am earning. Key example at the moment is Le Cyclopes by JP Rameau. My preferred version of that is Vikingur Olafsson’s recording. It is imperious and bright. I also listen to Grigory Sokolov’s arrangement of it too which is less emphatic, but no less compelling. I wonder how they approach this. On a far less ambitious level, I am working on one of Mendelssohn’s Gondola songs at the moment (I have plans for an entry for that but currently lack the time to build it). But I look at the story I want to tell myself there. I see the gondola on the canals of Venice. I have a story being described. [Procreate Dreams has been released so I will learn to animate]. Is the story that Vikingur tells very different to Grigory’s film? I don’t know.
But I have to think about this.
All that to say though, that no one really has the definitive view of how to play the piano and some randomer on Reddit or PianoWorld isn’t really the sole arbiter of anything. Liberace and Viktor Borge were complete entertainers but they had the classical chops too. Not one or the other.
Which takes me back to the question of what do I do about a video channel? I don’t know. Ultimately I’d like people to want to play the piano after watching it. But not to constantly demand Misty as one young man called Craig did to me in a bar in Germany one night when I was 18 years old. Play Misty, Treasa, can’t you play Misty?
I still have no idea how to do it so, sorry Craig, it is not going to happen.
I ordered this, and Cornish Rhapsody a couple of weeks ago. They arrived during the week, making me very happy.
It’s odd to see the pre-decimalisation price on both of them, and of the two, this is less fragile. Both lots of sheet music date from the 1940s. I intend to scan them and add them to my digital library and use forScore to do the annotations and fingering, etc.
When I was looking for this sheet music, I came across documents about how the music for this and especially for Dangerous Moonlight (Warsaw concerto, mentioned a couple of times on this site) were subject to major demand once the films were released. I know that early in the twentieth centuries, the music charts were based on sheet music sales rather than recordings – that changed of course.
It’s a rather romantic idea, this idea of buying the sheet music to play it yourself rather than buying the recording. People still do this – Interstellar is an example of one, and of course Yann Tiersen’s gorgeous music from Amelie.
The piano is a bit inaccessible at the moment so I haven’t had a change to go at this. I like to feel that these pieces come from a golden era of piano/film music. I kind of day dream about it.
I’ve written about the search for the Rota before but I bit the bullet and ordered it last night. I found Cornish Rhapsody while I was looking around there too.
The version I’ve linked is Philip Fowke’s recording with the RTE Concert Orchestra on Naxos. It’s one of two recordings I picked up in the past, the other being I think, Kenneth Ogden on HMV Classical. I’m not sure when I will have time to do read throughs.
Someone found some sheet music at a brocante a few weeks ago and picked up a couple of pieces for me. 2 Polonaises, Opus 40 was one of them.
Sheet music for Chopin’s Opus 40, a couple of polonaises
I kind of like that the editor was Henry Litolff. But that’s by away of an aside.
ON a separate but related note, lately, I have been fighting an internal battle on the question of markings. Fingerings. Emphasises and things like this. Basically, when I was a child doing RIAM exams, there was a painful experience of many months attempting to decipher a piece of music, convert it into something remotely recognisable. My piano teacher had a pencil, and what I considered old lady handwriting at the time. My exam books tended to get covered in pencil markings around fingerings and the notes that I consistently misread, and much more than anything, the dynamic markings. A week before the exam, an eraser was carefully applied and the markings all removed. To this day, I hate marking sheet music with any markings at all. This, from what I can see is completely counter to the practices I see around the internet. I sat through practice planning with ToneBase lately and someone noted that of course you should keep your markings, why would you DO all that work and not be able to access it if you set the piece aside and wanted to come back to it months or even years later.
I see the logic. But I don’t want to write on it so my markings tend to go on my digital copies of the music on my iPad. And I am clearly just not used to it.
What does this have to do with Chopin? Well, when I opened the sheet music pictured above, I see the markings. They are (this is awfully familiary) in pencil. And I can only read some of them.
Forte?
Molto forte?
There are definitely far fewer markings than was on my K545 back in the day. I’ve never tried this. I should.
From what I can see, the person who used this before I got my hands on it only played No 1. There are no markings on No 2.
I’ve found that between this and the couple of second hand sheets I bought myself lately (Hummel and Guastevino amongst other things), I’m starting to get fascinated by it. I’d love to know about more second hand sheet music shops.