Performer: ShiroKuro, USA, 25 years of mediocrity
Piece: September Song, by Alexis Ffrench
Comment Policy: Positive comments only.
Source of music: Sheet music, as transcribed by Jessica Black (sadly, Alexis Ffrench has not released an official score for this piece)
Instrument: Yamaha C2 (26 years old!)
Recording method: iPhone
Additional info: This is the third time I've worked on this piece (the first two times were 2021, and 2024). I suppose this is marginally better, but I hear too much caution in this recording and not enough singing. It sounds much better when I relax and focus on making the piece sing, but a lot of distracting mistakes appear. So it feels like it's still just outside of my playing ability. I might be able to get a better (e.g., less cautious and also not mistake-riddled) recording, but I have to leave for a conference tomorrow, so I ran out of time (sorry, I could not resist a little excuse-making! 😅
Now for some comments about the music itself... I love this piece, and decided the first time I heard it that I wanted to learn it. One thing that's fun about it is that it has a hidden melody, can you find it? It's by Earth Wind and Fire (and no, it's not EWF's September). The piece has five sharps, but I've always preferred sharps to flats, so it wasn't not too challenging to read.
One challenge (like Miracles, which I submitted to the last PT recital) is that it has inner voices and you have to distribute some lines across the LH and RH, rather than being able to have the same line in one hand. So for me, the first step to learning the piece is to make those hand distribution decisions. When I sat down to relearn this in May, I got a clean copy of the score (e.g., without the fingerings I wrote in the last time I worked on it), and started that decision making process from scratch. I haven't gone back to compare, but I would guess that some fingering decisions are the same as the last time I played it, while others are different. Now that I'm comfortable with that distribution, it feels nice in the hand.
Some day I'd like to play this as cool and laid back as Mr. Ffrench does, but for now, this is what I've got.
Thank you for listening!