Had my lesson yesterday. It was soooo good! Really fantastic.
First we talked about the basics of the program, how the semester will go, the jury and all that. Then we talked about my background and what pieces I’ve played and am playing, what pieces I’m interested in. Before the lesson, I sent her my video from the PT recital, so she had already watched that.
I had also copied what I wrote above, in this thread, and brought it to the lesson. So we looked through my notes and talked about the sheet music snippets, and also discussed about some Chopin etudes. She thought the Einaudi piece was a lot like some Chopin etudes (we talked about Etude 25 no 1, which I would love to play!)
She thought my assessment of myself was very useful and she said she liked the idea of working on those areas. So she had me jump in with Croatian Rhapsody, which she had never heard before. She loved the music, and immediately gave me tons of things to work on to bring out more musicality. It was amazing! I really felt like I will be able to learn so much from her!
She also said she was very exited to learn about new pieces and new composers from me. Oh and I showed her my Canon in D mash-up arrangement that I want to record for PIYW, and she loved it! 😃 I didn’t exactly explain PIYW (i.e., I didn’t exactly say “I’m participating in a virtual recital with my imaginary friends”) but I said I committed to sharing a recording of it online, and she said she loved that idea 🙂
So as for how the semester will go, I think I wrote above that the program requires you to work on (a minimum of) three pieces from different genres. So for the short run, we’ll work on the Canon in D (as an example of more traditional rep), Croatian Rhapsody (modern rep), and then we’ll add Bach. And maybe if/when I move on from the Canon after recording it, we’ll switch to something by Chopin or Liszt for something from the traditional rep. She did say the genres rule was sort of flexible, i.e., yes we can count the Canon as baroque, but she strongly recommended adding Bach (which I’m keen to do anyway), and she said we could sort of count Bach as Bach and then if I stick with the Canon, we could sort of count that as classical/modern (bc of my arrangement). Or we could replace the Canon and pull something from other traditional piano literature (e.g., romantic era etc.) Or she said if I had two modern pieces, that would be fine as long as they were different stylistically. She basically felt like the pieces I was considering all had a lot of merit as pieces for study, so it was nice to have that confirmation.
So I think that’s it. This is going to be so good! Yay!!