Performer: ShiroKuro, Midwest, USA, 25+ years.
Piece: Miracles by Alexis Ffrench
Comment Policy: Positive comments only.
Source of music: Sheet music, transcribed by PT's own Rubens.
Instrument: Yamaha C2 grand
Recording method: iPhone
Additional info: In the fall of 2024, I fell in love with this piece and was going crazy because I couldn't find the score. Ffrench publishes a lot of his scores, but this one was not included in any of his score books. In discussing this problem (my desperation for the score), I considered trying to pay for a transcription through one of the online services, but every place I found was quoting around $100 to transcribe it (which I just could not do). So a few people on PT had a go at transcribing it. And then @Rubens kindly (and spontaneously!) transcribed the whole thing (all 8 pages/62 measures of it) and shared it here on PT. A true "miracle!" and one of the loveliest gifts I've ever received. 🙂
So I got the score, but it was somehow just too hard and my teacher at the time didn't really have any tips or guidance for me that made it seem manageable, so I put it aside. The biggest problem was the inner voices, which could be played with either the left or the right hand. In retrospect, I think that the thing that put this piece out of my reach was the difficulty of figuring out which hand to use and making those decisions.
Fast forward to January of this year, when I came back to the score and "took it out and "dusted it off" (digitally) and decided to work on it again. My current teacher had lots of advice about how to approach learning it, starting with forcing me to write in waaay more fingering (specifying LH or RH) than I normally would. But this meant going through and methodically, intentionally choosing which hand I would use for those inner voices, and then because I was writing the fingering in, it meant that I was playing it the same way every time. And of course that changed everything. It started coming together relatively quickly after that. Eventually I decided to use this for my piano jury piece, which most of you will recall from my jury prep threads.
So that is the story of how this piece came to be part of my piano studies this semester. I have learned so much from working on this piece, and also from prepping it for the jury performance. And I love playing it. There is still a lot to learn in it, and I play it much more slowly than Mr. Ffrench. But I am pretty happy with where it is right now, and I plan to keep it in my playable repertoire for a long time.
If you read this far, thank you, and I hope you enjoy my rendition of Miracles.