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Robert Levin on Mozart and improvisation, and uncovering an embellished manuscript; the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; Steven Osborne on learning Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit; sound advice on practising and how to practice ‘silently’; music is the art of ‘continuing’; concerts at Hindhead Music Centre; fundraising concerts for Amnesty at 50; new score preview function on Pianostreet
Robert Levin: “Mozart was the Duke Ellington of the 18th century”
Embellished Mozart manuscript uncovered
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment blog
Silent Practice: the Art of Inner Listening
Fundraising concerts for Amnesty International at 50
New Feature from Pianostreet: Score Preview
As my autumn teaching term is about to start, a post on practising seems appropriate. Several of my students have already fessed up to me, via email and Facebook, that they have done little or no practising over the summer break. I’m disappointed, of course, especially as one is working towards Grade 3 at the moment, but I’m not surprised. Children have a wealth of other activities to distract them, and seem to regard the long summer holiday as the ultimate down time. Piano practice goes the way of schoolwork: forgotten for six weeks.
It is a truth universally acknowledged (with apologies to Jane Austen), that regular, focussed practising reaps rewards. On the most basic level, we practice to get better, to become proficient, to ensure we never play a wrong note. However, productive practising should never just be mindless “note bashing”. As Seymour Bernstein says in his excellent book With Your Own Two Hands, “productive practising puts you in touch with an all-pervasive order. It is the total synthesis of your emotions, reason, sensory perceptions and physical co-ordination.” On a simpler level, to me this translates as: Head, Heart, Hands, which I’ll call “the Three H’s”.
Head: Never practice mindlessly. Engage with the music, think THINK about it. Be super-accurate in your reading and understanding of the score. Find out more about the composer and listen ‘around’ the piece to understand the context in which it was created. Think about what makes the piece special. What is the composer trying to convey? How will you express that message in your performance? What do you need to do to this music to “tell the story”? Learn patience when practising, and be receptive: rewards come slowly.
Heart: Fall in love with your instrument and its literature. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t love it – and I know from conversations with other musicians, amateur and professional, that this is a common feeling. Immerse yourself in the music, lose yourself in it. If you love your music, you will work more creatively, and your unconditional love and emotional attachment will transform “deliberate concentration” into “spontaneous concentration” (Seymour Bernstein). This is what sports people call being “in the zone”. At this magical point, you will feel everything more closely, every note, every nuance, thus bringing you more in accord with the composer’s intentions. “Mechanical practising, if devoid of feeling, can produce accuracy but not musicality” (SB). Remember, music is a language of emotion: without emotion, a performance can be empty and unconvincing. Allow yourself to be carried away by the exuberance of the music: playing with passion can even out “bumpy” sections far better than repetitive scales or arpeggios.
Hands: Every physical gesture we make at the piano transfers into an emotion – and vice versa. Engage your body – fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, back, torso, legs – and turn it into a vehicle for musical feeling. Be aware of everything you do and feel at the piano. Learn to sense the weight in your arms, from shoulder to finger tip, and experiment with different kinds of touch and movement to achieve different effects and emotions: high fingers, low fingers, wrist staccato, finger staccato, rotary motion, dropped wrist.
And remember:
“The last note is never the last – it is a point of departure for something to come”
(Seymour Bernstein)
Some years ago, before I resumed playing the piano seriously and started taking lessons again, I would open a score, look at the forest of notes and think “I’ll never be able to play that!”. I’d visit my friend Michael, who owns a beautiful Steinway B (purchased when he retired, instead of the clichéd sports car), see Schumann’s Kreisleriana open on the music rack, and my heart would sink. “I’ll never be able to play that!”.
There are certain pieces which represent the high Himalayan peaks of the piano repertoire: the Rach 3, Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes, Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, Balakirev’s Islamey, Chopin’s two sets of Etudes, to name but a few. Pieces which have become the preserve of the virtuoso pianist to showcase technical prowess and extreme pianism. We probably have Franz Liszt – he of the famously difficult Transcendental Etudes – to thank for the elevation of the pianist from salon ivory-tinkler, providing a pleasing accompaniment to drinks, supper and chat, to onstage superstar whose pianistic pyrotechnics caused ladies to faint and piano strings to break
About 18 months into my study with my current teacher, I heard Chopin’s Etude in C sharp minor, no. 7 from the Opus 25, on Radio Three’s Breakfast show, and was instantly entranced by its melancholic tone, the singing left hand cello-like melody (this Etude is nicknamed “the cello”), the floating chords in the right hand, in which the simplest secondary melody is embedded. I downloaded the score from Pianostreet and started to learn it. Eventually I performed it at a concert at my teacher’s house last year, and also on a 1920s Bluthner owned by Sir Alfred Beit, at Russborough in County Wicklow. “I can play a Chopin Etude” I told myself, when my confidence needed a boost. I felt I had at last entered that exclusive Himalayan club.
Playing the Russborough Bluthner
My teacher then suggested another Etude, this time the E major from the Opus 10, a piece I had always wanted to be able to play. This is one of the most famous of Chopin’s Etudes (along with the ‘Winter Wind’, the ‘Revolutionary’, the ‘Black Key’, the ‘Aeolian Harp’ and the ‘Butterfly’), which adds an extra degree of difficulty in the learning process. As my teacher said, “It’s so famous, and you want to play it well”. Aside from the dread sixths in the middle section (which, once analysed, unpicked, and put back together again, are not so fearsome – there is a pattern, yes, really!), it’s not as hard as it looks. Oh, all right, it is pretty difficult – allowing the right hand melody to sing above the accompaniment and achieving balance between the hands being the chief issues of this piece – but it is certainly not insurmountable, and my teacher would not have suggested I learn it if she did not think I could cope with it. This massive boost to my confidence has enabled me to go on to learn one of Chopin’s Ballades (the first, in G minor), some pieces by Liszt from the Années, and one of Messiaen’s Vingt Regards. Waiting patiently in my score library is Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantasie Opus 61, one or more of the Scherzi, more Liszt, Hindemith, more Messiaen…. Now, when I open a score, I do not immediately react negatively: “I’ll never be able to play that!” has been replaced with “OK, where do I start?”.
Analaysing the score, going through it with a pencil, looking for patterns and sequences, listening to other people playing it, and general familiarity with what the printed page looks like before you all assist in learning. There is also a physical-versus-mental aspect: convince yourself on first sight of a new piece that you can’t play it, and you probably won’t. But sit down and sight read through it, get your fingers round the notes, enjoy the architecture and melody of the piece, spend time with the music, inhabit it, and quite soon it will become familiar; eventually it will be like an old friend (which is how I feel about the Messiaen now, despite finding it utterly terrifying for the first few months of learning it!).
There are other practical considerations, of course. Some music is physically very difficult or tiring to play, although I dispute the claim that you need big hands to play Liszt or Rachmaninov. You don’t; just a strategy for getting around the music efficiently and comfortably. Some pieces do not lie comfortably under the hand; others are simply exhausting to play and sometimes one is practising only to improve stamina.
Young students often lack the confidence to pick up music on their own, without a teacher’s help to guide them through the score. When I start a student on a new piece, we go through it together. I ask the student to highlight any signs or terms they don’t understand, to mark patterns and sequences, and to generally take the music apart and separate it into manageable chunks. Thus, a page of score which at first appeared daunting can be quickly simplified, making the learning process easier. Of course, many young students want to be able to play the piece straight through, preferably loud and fast (!), and find the crucial detailed study dull and arduous. But working in this way reaps huge rewards: I find I can learn – and retain – music much more quickly now, and “tricks” learnt from, say, a Chopin Etude, can be applied to other music. The “dread sixths” passage of the Opus 10, No. 3 enabled me to devise a simple strategy for a similar section in Liszt’s Sonetto 123 del Petrarca. A case of “Well, hello! I’ve seen this before!”.
The piano repertoire is vast, hugely varied, and wonderful: don’t discount certain pieces because you think you’ll never be able to play them – but remember: sometimes the simplest pieces are the hardest!
Chopin, Etude Opus 25, No. 7 – Murray Perahia
Liszt, ‘La Campanella’ – Jorge Bolet
Mozart, Adagio for Glass Harmonica
Berezovsky plays ‘Islamey’
I’m going on holiday from the end of this week, 10 days enforced isolation in the French Alps, with an uncertain mobile phone signal and little or no internet access – so no social networking or blogging for me!
The best holidays are, for me, those which allow my head some “time off”. Because I do not keep written records for my students (except their practice notebooks), during term time, my head is cram-full of information about my pupils, where they are in their learning, what they need to be doing, who needs to be pushed a little more, or needs some teacherly TLC, exam deadlines and regulations, new repertoire etc, as well as another huge store of information about my own learning, what I need to be doing with repertoire and technique, preparing for my own lessons and so on. All this thinking is very tiring (yes, really!) and so an opportunity for the brain to have some down time is really crucial.
Having said that, I do not intend to do absolutely nothing for 10 days. The landscape is very beautiful: Edelweiss really does grow in the mountains, and in the summer, the valleys are green and lush, and the air is clear and sweet. One of the most memorable moments in the mountains for me was being atop Les Chavannes above Les Gets and seeing the clouds part, revealing Mont Blanc, its glacier glinting in the sunshine. Or camping on Mt Chery (the other side of Les Gets) and watching the sun come up through the roof-light of the camper van….. While husband and son and friends chuck themselves down the side of the mountain on their downhill bikes (Les Gets and Morzine are a mecca for mountainbikers in the summer months, and the villages are full of smelly, muddy biking blokes – and few girls too: in their full-face helmets and body armour, they look like extras from Star Wars), I will find a nice spot up the mountain, amongst the wild flowers, and read or listen to music, or simply enjoy the view.
That's not me on the bike!
Time away from the piano is healing, and very useful, as it can offer a chance to rest and regroup, to reasses or appraise what one has been working on, and to come home, hopefully, refreshed and raring to go again. I’ve spent the last 2 weeks frantically trying to get some new repertoire into the fingers ahead of the holiday, while also finessing existing work, and now feel reasonably on top of everything, and content to leave it alone. I’ll take my iPad away with me, loaded with scores of all the music I’m working on at the moment, so that I can read it and listen to it and meditate upon it while atop an Alp. Working away from the keyboard will enable me to do some useful memory work, and consider shaping and presentation, while giving the fingers and hands a well-earned rest. A few new insights about the music may emerge too…… A friend offered to loan me her electronic keyboard on which to practice while I’m away, but since its range is roughly 4 octaves, it really won’t help with the Messiaen I’m learning, which requires the full range of the keyboard! Still, it was a kind thought. The table of the chalet will have to to serve as a “air piano” – or I could always use the ‘Pro Virtuoso’ app on my iPad…..
Information on Les Gets here
Pro Virtuoso app is available from iTunes
Information on ForScore score-reading app
Pianist Stephen Hough tests piano apps
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