Achievement of the Day or Week

JB_PT · 2024-06-25T18:07:48+00:00

There was a similar thread on That Other Forum...it was started in 2010 and has almost 11k posts! I thought it would be nice to have something like that here...

lautreamont

This week was a mixture of steady progress and exciting advances. My polishing of a few Scriabin Preludes is going ok, and I'm learning Scriabin's Op. 11 no. 2. The stress on Galuppi's F major andante sonate movement is really about there now. The 32nd note runs are pretty much how I want them, and a lot of the trickier rhythms of the piece seem doable.

But the main excitement of the week came on my "weekend pieces." During the weekend I like to work on different pieces so I don't get so bogged down on details of what I'm focused on. This weekend I worked on two pieces by Couperin and two Mazurkas by Chopin (Op 7 nos. 1 and 4). The difficulties in Op. 7 no. 1 are mostly the trills that use weaker fingers. I've got those in a good place now. I can play the whole piece mostly at tempo, with some hesitations in the middle section where the accompaniment pattern gets mixed up. Op. 7 no 4 is something i started for variety. It's probably the fastest piece I've ever tried to learn. But it's also going well. I think the second section with the staccato quavers might be trickier than the more showy first section.

I had the thought that my piano journey might have really begun in the past month, after so much shooting for the stars, so many technical setbacks, and so much aimlessness. I feel like I'm capable of tackling repertoire I really like now, and growth is going to get more visible.

lilypad

lautreamont It looks like an exciting time for you!

I just finished Unit 5 of Piano Adventures level 5, so only have Unit 6 to go before I'm free from the land of method books.

lautreamont

It's very exciting! A couple years ago I had to really assess where I was at with the piano, realizing what I had to work on improving, and what I could already do and needed to do with more musical awareness. It's been challenging, and there have been many roadblocks, but repertoire is starting to be accessible to me. In part, all the considerable effort I've put into the piano is finally showing, but I have a lot to learn, and a lot of mechanical fluency to pick up in the coming years. The good thing about the last two years is that it taught me to appreciate and find richness in what appears to be simple.

It's nice for you to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I hope Unit 6 goes smoothly!

pianoloverus

Finally finished Korngold's transcription of his song Die Schonste Nacht. There are three different versions of this song that I know of, and I play the one based on the piano vocal score from the operetta this is taken from. Here is a recording of that version by Stephen Hough that I just discovered a few days ago.

The most difficult version is the one played by Korngold himself while he sings along. It's quite inspiring because he obviously loves this melody. Korngold was a terrific pianist and embellishes this his version with lots of extra notes and runs. In fact, the person who transcribed this version for me asked if I thought there might be two pianists playing it.

Yunchan Lim, the sensational winner of a recent Van Cliburn competition, has been playing his own version of this piece (which I assume was based on Korngold's Youtube recording) as an encore. I think he plays it very well, but his transcription is not very accurate especially in the harmonies.

lautreamont

pianoloverus, that's exciting! On a related note to your story about the various transcriptions out there, I'm going to attend a Yunchan Lim concert this weekend.

pianoloverus

lautreamont Solo or concerto performance?

lautreamont

Ah, sorry. Solo, a recital, with the Goldberg Variations. I'm not a fan of concerti, so those are a tough sell to me.

lautreamont

This week's achievement was, despite having some health issues that made a lot of things difficult, I still managed to play a bit every day. I'm working on the middle section now of Scriabin Op. 11 no. 2 and have everything down hands separate, just need to deal with the complexity of when it's all together, mostly a matter of getting things up to tempo. During the weekend I pretty much got Chopin Op. 7 no. 1 down and am in a good place with no. 4 of the same set. With the health issues, I did a lot more Bach than anticipated, working through Bach's 1st sinfonia (technical hurdles overcome, memorized first half, just need to memorize second half and smooth things out). I also did a little practicing of Sinfonia 10 in G major, which I learned last year but couldn't play well enough. The issues with number 10 are mostly settling on a good fluid tempo and articulating, especially in the opening measures where I'm trying to play the bass quarter notes staccato that takes a little precision and working out when the hands begin to share voices.

lilypad

lautreamont I'm sorry about your health issues and glad that it looks like you're able to get a lot of time in on the piano.

My spouse has some serious health issues right now and I've been worrying a lot about that. I just discovered that practicing piano takes up enough of my bandwidth that I can't worry while I'm doing it and it lifts my mood for a while.

lautreamont

Playing the piano even seems to temporarily distract me when I would otherwise be feeling pain, perhaps the only activity I know of with that power.

This week I've simplified things a bit. I'm playing Scriabin Op. 11 no. 2 all the way through now, so it's a matter of time until the score is memorized, but I'm not yet putting much effort into perfecting areas of difficulty. The only other item of note is that I've rememorized Bach's 1st Sinfonia, already playing it better than I did last year, although I need to be more consistent with my trills and smooth a couple parts out of the more sequence-like areas towards the end.

thepianoplayer416

Submitted a 10 min. piano soundtrack to the Piano World Forum Online Recital. It's a set of pieces I started working on during the summer. Some pieces in the set were rerecorded a few times to get all the notes to sound right. I don't like to submit a recording in .MP3 which would degrade the quality but in order to squeeze 10 min. into 1 soundtrack had no choice.

The last time I played the pieces was 9 years ago on a digital keyboard. I was in a rush to travel out of town. After that haven't touch the pieces again.

The pieces were composed over a 9 year period. Although they share the same key of Em, these were not intended to be performed together as a set. Instead of releasing the pieces individually, decided to compile them into a single soundtrack.

pianoloverus

Mostly finished with this beautiful transcription by Hayato Sumino also known as Cateen:

lilypad

pianoloverus Congratulations. Merry-Go-Round of Life has been on my bucket list list since I first heard it.

pianoloverus

lilypad You can get the score for free here:

thepianoplayer416

pianoloverus Very nice pieces the first time I heard someone play a violin version of "Spirited Away" online.

Hope the rest of the score is not in Japanese besides the notes of course. Here the title & composer is in Japanese. The only thing that isn't is "Urtext".

plop_symphony

I have about two dozen sheet music books from Japanese publishers and while things like biographical and composer notes might be in Japanese, tempo markings and other score annotations are still in Italian (or English or French or...)

lilypad

I just started learning the last section of an arrangement of "The Rainbow Connection". It's actually in the middle, but the arrangement changes key 3 times and I decided to learn it a key at a time - so A major + coda, then Bb and finally intro and G major.

thepianoplayer416

lilypad It's been a while that I played an arrangement of the "Rainbow Connection". My downloaded version does have 1 key change half a pitch higher which I found difficult but not impossible.

Made a recording with an early Nikon digital camera that had only 10 min. recording time. Without any knowledge of how to reduce background noise the sound isn't as good as my recent recordings.

lautreamont

I hope everybody's been having a good piano time!

It's a time of year with a lot of travel and social commitments for me, and I'm also quite busy on other fronts, so I've scaled back my daily playing from about two hours to more like one. For accomplishments, I've relearned Bach's 1st Sinfonia. Just a year a go there were some nagging technical issues for some of the ornaments on weaker fingers, but my technical regime has really worked wonders. I have yet to bring this piece to deep memory, where I can casually play it without pentimenti, but I figure it won't be long. Next up on the Bach front is the 10th Sinfonia in G major, which I also learned last year, but which I could not play to any sort of acceptable level.

The other things I'm playing is a daily exercise from Émile-Robert Blanchet's Modern Piano Technique, which do a good job providing mental and digital food for thought, and Galuppi's F Major Sonata, which I'm not really working on enough to nudge it quite up to performance level just yet.

lautreamont

My achievement is getting back to the piano yesterday. I've been ill with pneumonia since the 27th of December and bedridden for most of that period. I'm not out of the clear totally but am feeling stronger. Yesterday, an unseasonably warm day, I went for a walk around the block (as a person who runs 25-30 miles a week, I'm sore from that tiny walk!). In the afternoon I played a bit of piano. I went through my entire technical regime, played a couple Bach pieces, one that stuck surprisingly well in my memory that I was worried about. Then I played a bit of a Galuppi F major andante movement. My fingers were surprisingly nimble, given that I haven't played in weeks, but I did feel myself at an energetic deficit, so I mostly improvised for the rest of my piano time, which was also nice.

It felt good to be playing again and to not have totally forgotten the Bach piece I learned last month.

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