Arms apart
When running passages have both hands playing the same fast notes an octave apart (the third-movement coda of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto, or the fourth movement of Chopin’s B flat minor Sonata), try practising them two octaves apart. It will wrong-foot you at first, but it will make the patterns more secure and will enable you to hear both voices more clearly.
Easy-peasy
Don’t forget to practise the easy parts of a piece, especially to make memory secure. There’s a passage in the third movement of Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto, the simplest few bars in the movement, that can come apart in a performance if not worked on. For this example, memorise the first note of each of the three groups – they make up a major triad – and keep them consciously in mind.
Use the butter wrapper to grease your baking tray
As well as doing scales, arpeggios and other exercises, we should devise exercises from figuration in the pieces we are playing. Alfred Cortot’s editions of Chopin reign supreme here and Godowsky’s Studies on the Chopin Études also have superlative examples of this. Take a knotty corner (almost any piece you learn will yield such a starting point) and work it through as a finger exercise.
Listen to the other hand
When one hand has a difficult passage, focus on the easier hand. You need to have worked hard on the tricky parts, of course, but in performance this tip will often make the problem disappear.
Stop practising!
… when you feel any tension in the arms or hands. If you don’t, you might find you have to stop playing altogether as you nurse an injury.
There’s no such thing as a difficult piece
I’ve sometimes been asked, ‘What is the hardest piece you’ve played?’, or ‘Is Scriabin’s Fifth Sonata more difficult than his Fourth?’, and so on. It’s certainly common for audience members to marvel at notes flying over the keys in every direction (‘Your hands were a blur’), but less common for someone to comment about the voicing of a soft chord, or the spinning of a singing line over a delicate counterpoint. What is difficult or easy in execution is not always what it seems to the listening eye – a torrential glissando is just about the simplest thing to do on the piano, yet it can still produce a gasp of wonder. Great performances of the Chopin études are not those when the right hand is busy with speed, but those when the left hand shapes and colours the harmony and counterpoint with infinite finesse. Although it’s a frivolity to discuss whether this piece is more difficult than that piece it’s of crucial importance to analyse what makes something difficult in a passage, so that we can solve the problems. Few pieces (except certain études) are ‘difficult’ – they merely have difficult passages in them. And even these tricky passages are not tricky in themselves. Rather they contain tricky parts, or the combination of one part with another is tricky. To keep this in mind in the practice room is an important way of ensuring the performance onstage is safe and secure.
Unfinished
When is something finished? For a painter or composer the question is very real: when do you set aside a canvas or a manuscript and feel that you’ve given birth at last to something separate from you, the creative umbilical cord cut, its knot tied? Adrian Searle, in an illuminating essay on the painter Peter Doig, put it this way:
Painters are often asked how they know when a painting is finished, and frequently find the question puzzling and mysterious even to themselves. The answer may lie in the fact that, having in a sense painted themselves into a space, having invested themselves in it through all the hours of looking and painting, the artist must eventually find a way out of this mental territory. At this point the painting becomes other to them, resists and even reproaches and denies them.
But what about a performer? When is the piece to be played actually learned? It’s a vexing question, and I often wake up in the morning with an anxious feeling about it: is that sonata I’m playing next week really ready? And what does ‘being ready’ mean? It’s not just being able to play through something at the right tempo, with the right notes, without forgetting – although that’s a good start. It is more like feeling that you wear a piece. You feel so united with it and its intricacies of text, texture and mood that it’s almost as if you have actually created it. I can feel for months that a piece is not properly under my fingers in the learning stage, and it’s impossible to predict when the penny will finally drop and it will be ready to go. It’s one reason I try to start working on new repertoire about a year before the first performance, allowing myself months of leeway, and, more importantly, months of marinating time.
But then there is the instant decomposition – like the sound on a piano itself, which starts to disappear as soon as the note is struck. I often find that a month or so without practising a complex piece and the ability to play it begins to melt away like ice from an unplugged freezer. It is here where I really envy the painter’s ability to sign a piece, frame it, and forget about it; or the sculptor who can hang a hat on the arm of a finished statue. The closest instrumentalists come to this is in recording, but then the listener becomes the person experiencing the artistic creation in unfinished, imperfect time: the CD is always the same, frozen in immortality; the person hearing is always changing, experiencing the music through ever-decaying mortality.
Fingering
One of the most important aspects of learning a piece, then memorising it, then playing it well, is our choice of fingering. We have ten digits with which to play thousands of notes in countless permutations, and whether we select the fingers we will use beforehand or just wing it on the night, a choice still has to be made. This choice is crucial at times because playing a certain note with the fourth rather than the second finger can mean the difference between a passage always feeling awkward and uncomfortable, or it rippling along effortlessly. And, as Artur Schnabel pointed out, we should not just look for the easiest fingering but for the most musical fingering, one that matches the phrasing, brings out the accents or inflections or allows a singing line to float along seamlessly.
For me, making those decisions during the learning process (however many times I might change my mind – that too is part of the deal) is essential. Not only does writing in the fingerings as you learn the notes make memorising easier and playing the notes more secure, it makes the learning process a real study … an uncovering and polishing of musical and technical stones. Too often students learn new pieces by sloppily sight-reading them until somehow they can play them through, rather than with a rabbinical pouring over the score. Fingering for clarity, for angularity, for texture, for sound, different for soft or loud passages, different for fast or slow passages.
In the early years of a career we can be asked to step in at the last moment for a colleague who has cancelled. I remember an occasion when I was in my early twenties getting a call to play the Bartók Third with the Chicago Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen. There was about a day’s notice and I hadn’t played the piece for a couple of years. I could accept the date because the nasty, twisting passage towards the end of the third movement was fingered and thus easier to recall quickly to my motor memory. It saved me a couple of hours work when I had only twenty-four hours to pack my bags and fly across the Atlantic.
Remembering what watered our roots
I recently came across an interview with Rachmaninov from 1910 in the Etude, a popular American magazine published by Theodore Presser from 1883 until 1957 that covered many musical topics and included contributions from many pianists over the years.
Any thoughts about playing the piano by a pianist as great as Rachmaninov are cherishable but what struck me most in this article was his belief that young pianists should study Hanon for up to five years during their formation and that they should play scales with the metronome in their exams:
Personally, I believe this matter of insisting upon a thorough technical knowledge is a very vital one. The mere ability to play a few pieces does not constitute musical proficiency. It is lik
e those music boxes which possess only a few tunes. The student’s technical grasp should be all embracing.
It struck me because, although many of us have spent gruelling hours in the practice studio grinding through pianistic callisthenics of this kind, most pianists, when reaching maturity and having professional careers, discount their use: ‘Oh, they’re all a waste of time … You can study technique in the context of the pieces you’re practising … Scales, arpeggios … useless!’ And so on. I’ve heard such dismissive statements countless times from colleagues, both teachers and performers.
What’s curious, though, is that those doing the dismissing have often done the exercises in their early years. They say their rejection of them comes from later experience, yet who is to assess how much benefit they derived from the exercises before they decided to trash them? Who can say if those pearly passages they are able to play today were made more lustrous by a facility developed years before?
I do think there comes a time when exercises are less useful, and time can certainly be wasted for young pianists if they rattle through Hanon mindlessly for hours on end. But I remember clearly my early teachers guiding me towards Beringer, then Joseffy and Pischna, then Hanon (although to be done in keys other than C major) and later other invented exercises of their own. Gordon Green, Derrick Wyndham and Adele Marcus all had their own drills. I still use my own adapted version of the latter’s exercise passed down from her own teacher, Josef Lhévinne, as well as others I have stumbled upon, fiddling on backstage pianos.
I’ve never doubted the importance of such workouts in the early years, provided that they are done correctly, because playing the piano is about muscles and tendons and reflexes and joints as well as emotions and intellect. Reading an endorsement from one of the greatest pianists of all time reassured me. It’s important to remember our roots, and to remember what nourished them in formative times.
A good edition
‘What edition should I use?’ – a common question from music students to their teachers. It might seem amazing to non-musicians, but when you decide to play a Beethoven sonata it isn’t just a matter of going to the library and taking BEETHOVEN SONATAS off the shelf. Different editions will not only have a different layout on the page, but often different phrasings, dynamics, pedallings, and sometimes notes – and that’s just those that aim to be faithful to the composer’s intention, the so-called ‘urtext’ editions. The situation is much better today than it was a hundred years ago. Until roughly the 1950s music publishers would seek out famous pianists as editors, and it was expected that not only their personal fingerings would be added, but that changes would be made corresponding to the way they performed the pieces on stage – sometimes simplifications, sometimes added notes for extra brilliance, always extra dynamics and phrasing. Most of these editions are now largely to be found only in second-hand shops, although there is much in the von Bülow Beethoven sonatas or the Cortot Chopin works that is still of interest.
The problems often began within the composers’ lifetimes, and there is still debate as to whether the original handwritten manuscript or the first printed edition should take precedence. When there are differences between the two, was it because of the composer’s change of mind at the proofreading stage, or was it an error in the printing process, or was it the editor presuming a mistake and correcting it without checking with its originator? Furthermore, are a composer’s second thoughts, read through in the cold light of day, always to be preferred to the original text, written in the full heat of creation? Chopin is a particularly vexed example because changing his mind in small details seems to have been part of his unique style of extemporised decoration within carefully thought-out structures. But then we are told by contemporaries that, however beautiful we might find his ballades, the ones heard when he was improvising in the salons of Paris were even more extraordinary. Thank goodness we have four of them written down, whatever edition we end up using.
Where do you sit to play the piano?
Well, in front of the keyboard, of course. Ah, but where?
Well, mostly in the centre, which (on a piano with 88 keys) is not middle C, but middle E. We sit there because it’s where the body is best balanced. The fingers are only one part of playing the piano. Wrists, arms, shoulders, back, knees, legs, feet and elbows all play a vital role, and these need to work in complete union with optimum relaxation, strength, flexibility and control.
I realised many years ago, when learning Britten’s Diversions, that when I played something for the left hand alone I had to sit slightly to the right of centre to achieve the necessary balance. It is a lot easier to reach out for notes at arm’s length than to squash the arm in the opposite direction (think a tennis backhand stroke), so by sitting to the right you add an extra octave of ease to your keyboard possibilities. This is a fairly commonly known phenomenon. As the years passed, I realised that in certain two-handed passages the centre of gravity was not actually in the centre of the keyboard either, so I started experimenting with sitting slightly to the left or right and found it a revelation. Now, in almost every piece I play, I will adjust my position many times during its course.
Here are some examples:
Sitting to the right
There are so many possibilities in so many pieces, but try two passages in Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto, the opening section of the third movement and the double-note passage after figure 56. The centre of gravity in both of these sparkling virtuosic passages is far to the right of middle C, so if you’re facing the C above middle C for the former and a couple of notes further towards the right for the latter you will find you have much more control, particularly of the left hand. So much for control of difficult passagework; what about power? Try moving to the right during the third and fourth bars after figure 75 in the same movement. Because your body will be central to the massive chords being played you can direct all of the muscle power evenly between the notes, and increase the volume by about a fifth.
Sitting to the left
This is less frequently helpful, although try the opening of Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto, up to figure 3, sitting opposite the A below middle C rather than the usual E above middle C. Again, you’ll have more power in a passage where it’s easy to be swamped by the orchestra because you’ll be centred on the notes being played. One further example is the Brahms Fourth Ballade op. 10. To achieve a perfect tonal control of the Più lento section (bars 47–73) try sitting opposite the G below middle C. I can guarantee you’ll be amazed by how much easier it is to shape these soft, murmuring phrases when the right elbow is not squashed into your ribs. In fact, I decided to play the whole of this piece sitting in this position to avoid having to shift during it and breaking the mood.
Anchored in the middle
Then there are those moments when you are sitting centre keyboard yet have to move temporarily or suddenly to the right or left. Rarely does a professional pianist actually fall off the stool but the very muscles we need to keep our balance are also those needed to play that arpeggio or chord with tonal control. This is when our knees can help. If we push them up under the keyframe (right knee if leaning left, left knee if leaning right, or sometimes both knees together) they will give stability to the torso, enabling us to move freely and to use all of the relaxed weight of our shoulders and backs to depress the keys.
Romantic in soul not body: sitting still at the piano
In an earlier world an aristocratic elegance and effortlessness at the keyboard was something to be prized. I haven’t asked an ear specialist about this, but I’ve often wondered whether we actually hear better when our heads are still. Even animals freeze to attention, cocking their heads, when they want to hear something important. Few things are more important for the pianist on the physical level than listening to the shaping of a phrase, the filtering of a pedal effect, or the balancing of a chord.
People often have a vision of the Romantic instrumentalist as someone who moves around, as if
a physical embodiment of the music’s inner turbulence. Conversely, some have the belief that the cooler the body language the cooler the music making. Historically this was not the case, and artists of premium Romantic credentials were often physically the most still when they played: Horowitz, Rubinstein, Hofmann, Rachmaninov … and Rachmaninov’s great friend and favoured interpreter, Benno Moiseiwitsch.
Depressed: the amazing world of the pedal
Anton Rubinstein (the nineteenth-century composer, teacher, pianist and, indeed, founder of Russian pianism – not Artur Rubinstein, the twentieth-century pianist) is credited with saying that the pedal is ‘the soul of the piano’. It’s a lovely phrase, poetic and precise at the same time. The ‘soul’ both as the principle of being – what makes me me – and also the source of meaning for that ‘me’, the warmth that heats the blood.
Actually, if I’m going to be a stickler for complete accuracy, Rubinstein probably should have said ‘dampers’ instead of ‘pedal’, as the latter is merely the tool to activate the former: the sole connecting with the soul. Every note on a piano is a hammer striking strings, and every one of those strings (except the short ones in the far treble) has a damper on it. As each key is depressed a damper automatically rises to allow strings to vibrate. Then, as the note is released, the damper falls down again onto the strings to snuff out the vibration. The pedal (we always mean the right pedal when using the singular word) lifts up all of the dampers at once, making the whole instrument a box of resonance. It’s the opening of the curtains on a sunny day.
Rough Ideas Page 14
