Several students have recently asked me for a ‘practice reminder list’ consisting of important elements to consider during their daily practice session. We all want to ensure fruitful practice; there’s nothing more depressing and dispiriting than spending an hour or two working away at the piano only to discover that nothing has really been achieved. We’ve all done this at some point, but helpful, solid practice can only take place when the right physical and mental conditions have been instilled. This does require some thought and preparation at each practice session.
These suggestions can be applied to any standard or grade, although the students who requested this list are all around Grade 8 and the DipABRSM level. Even at higher levels of piano playing, the following should still serve as a reminder in order to establish good habits and purely to ‘feel’ comfortable during practice time. These tips have all no doubt been mentioned before…
It’s hard to believe but summer is nearly upon us. FCPS students are getting out later this year due to snow days, so the regular school year piano lessons are going a bit longer, as well.
Here’s the basic schedule from now through the start of fall lessons. Please remember that students must take at least 6 summer lessons to hold a current school year lesson time for the fall.
The last day of school is June 25, so there are no lessons week of June 23 (school age students only. Adults continue, as always)
Lessons (11 adult lessons, 10 school age students offered):
June 2 9, 16, 23 (except FCPS students – last week of school), 30
July 7 (mornings only), 14, 21, 28
Aug 4, 11
Sept 8, the fall semester begins
If you need to reschedule, please call, email or FaceBook me and with at least 24-hours notice. There are some open spots available on the schedule. You can view them here: https://ocms.youcanbook.me/. Those times are “more like guidelines. I will contact you to confirm any changes. As always, the PW is “piano”.
Those who read this blog regularly will know how I enjoy holding little competitions. Today I’m offering a chance to win a Piano Techniques app designed especially by Pianist magazine for your iPad.
Pianist magazine, in association with Steinway Hall London, is proud to present its first-ever stand-alone app: Piano Techniques. When you’ve read the articles, watched the lessons, listened to the music, your playing will be better! It doesn’t matter what level you are – there’s something here for beginner through to advanced players.
The app contains some of the best articles from within the pages of Pianist written by its expert pianist teachers. Topics include sight-reading, chords, memorising, starting from scratch, returning to the piano after a long break, fingering, a star interview with Lang Lang and more. You can even watch and listen to Lang Lang perform at the end of the interview. He’s playing the gorgeous Liszt Romance (this piece was featured inside Pianist magazine’s Scores section in the current issue 76).
cdcovers/tchaikovsky/concerto no 1 van cliburn.jpg (Photo credit: exquisitur)
Van Cliburn was just a pianist much the way Neil Armstrong was merely an astronaut. Simply put, the tall Texan’s musical talent and successes were out of this world.
Cliburn, who died Wednesday February 27, 2013 at age 78 at his Fort Worth home due to complications from bone cancer, was 23 when he strode into Moscow for the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition, created to showcase Soviet cultural superiority.
Playing with unerring precision and sublime emotion, he took the top prize and was given a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan, the first and last time a pianist won such an honor.
“Imagine galvanizing the attention of the entire world in the pre-Internet, pre-global TV year of 1958,” says Howard Reich, who got to know the Texas-based pianist while researching his 1993 biography, Van Cliburn. “As a Texan, he was so emblematic of the United States. But the Russians fell in love with his romanticism.”
In many ways, however, that seminal performance both made his name and sealed his fate.
The pieces that won him the competition — Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 — sold countless records (his Tchaikovsky No. 1 was the first classical record to sell more than a million copies) and became required concert staples.
“Playing on that treadmill for the next 20 years led him to burn out, and by 1978 he looked terrible and bowed out of public life,” says Reich. “He was a gentle soul, and that harsh public spotlight had a negative effect on him.”
It would be nine years before Cliburn performed again, at the White House for Ronald Reagan and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev. Although he made occasional appearances in the following decades, he spent most of his time overseeing his foundation and a quadrennial competition that bears his name.
“I can’t think of anyone who has done more to help promote the instrument and young performers than Van,” says Cliburn’s friend Yoheved Kaplinsky, chairman of the piano department at New York’s Juilliard School of Music, which Cliburn attended. “He was an icon in Fort Worth, and a person of great humility.”
Born Harvey Lavan Cliburn Jr. in Shreveport, La., Cliburn started piano lessons at age 3 and immediately showed prowess under the watchful eye of his mother, who had trained on the instrument under a teacher who had studied with Franz Liszt.
After moving to Texas, Cliburn played with Houston’s symphony at age 12, and at 17 entered Juilliard. At 20, he performed with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, setting the stage for his triumphant coup in Russia.
No one can imagine a ticker-tape parade for a pianist in this era, but in Cliburn’s heyday he was as much an inevitable cultural icon as he was a reluctant political figure. In the late ’50s, the Cold War was raging, the Beatles were still practicing and classical music still held sway.
But what truly made Cliburn unique was the humble ease with which he went about seducing the alleged enemy.
“Van marched in full of the musical values of the Old World, full of tremendous sincerity and with a remarkable ability to connect with audiences,” says Kaplinsky. “He may have transcended the boundaries of the art world and breached into the political world, but foremost Van was a consummate artist.”
That artistry is on display in various YouTube clips of Cliburn reprising his competition-winning form in Moscow in 1962. The pianist’s eyes are often closed as massive hands fly across the length of the keyboard. Utterly lost in the music, Cliburn seems almost oblivious to his audience.
“He had more of everything,” says Reich. “More height, more smiles, more sweep on the piano.”
In his later years, Cliburn collected the usual array of awards accorded cultural heroes. A Kennedy Center Honors tribute in 2001, a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003, and in 2004 Russia’s equivalent, the Russian Order of Friendship. In 2004, there was a predictable Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1994 a less-expected guest appearance as himself in the TV cartoon Iron Man.
On the personal front, Cliburn was a devout Baptist but also quietly gay; in the late ’90s, his longtime partner, Thomas Zaremba, unsuccessfully sued the pianist over compensation claims.
Ultimately, Cliburn will be remembered not just as a performer of startling skill, but also as a global cultural sensation in the age of shortwave radio.
“He did something that no one could have ever imagined back then,” says Reich. “He was ubiquitous.”
I have always really enjoyed playing Mozart’sFantasia in d minor and when I was asked to play for the new piano dedication service at my church I knew what I would “dust off” to perform.
The Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians defines the genre of musical fantasia as “a piece of instrumental music owning no restriction of formal construction, but the direct product of the composer’s impulse.”
The Fantasia in d minor has somewhat unusual rhythm, constantly changing tempo (seven different tempi occur throughout the piece), three cadenzas and its apparent lack of any recognizable musical form (as indicated by the “Fantasy” title). Although it begins in d minor, the final section is in D Major.
Mozart composed this, his third and final, Fantasia in 1782 and it was unfinished at the time of his death in 1791. Even Mozart’s sister, “Nannerl”, who came across the work in 1807, was astounded to have discovered a previously unknown composition of such quality.
In its original form this Fantasia was probability only a fragment of what was to be a larger work. The closing bars which are most frequently performed today originated from an unauthorized print believed to have been composed in 1806 by August Eberhard Müller, one of Mozart’s admirers.
Because it was unfinished, many of the dynamic and pedal markings are nonexistant and left for the performer to choose.
As you can see from these videos, there is a wide range of tempi and interpretation from Frederich Gulda’s 4 minute, 36 second rendition
to Glenn Gould’s version which lasts for 8 minutes, 22 seconds
Both these composers have added their own ornamentation to Mozart’s original work.
I will be playing from a G. Henley Verlagurtext edition instead of one of the many edited versions available. I prefer to make my own musical decisions wherever possible.
MaryO'Studio 