Dont always start practising at the beginning of a piece. This is true in a multi-movement work and even within movements. I ve ofte n noticed in masterclasses how students play the exposition (the first time the themes appear) better than the recapitulation (when they return in the final sec tion). I think this is because they they start working at the beginning, beginning, and practis e that section with with greater focus and energy. In Brahms s 2nd concerto, for examp le, we can spend a good hour or two working on the first half of the first movem ent and then find when the second-subject material returns that we re already tire d or distracted. Try starting to work from the development section section onwards and see what a difference it makes. Continuing this series on practising, and following on from the previou s post about not always beginning at the beginning beginning of a piece, it s not necessary to practise a piece all the way through on on one day. For instance, in a big son ata it can be helpful to practise the 1st movement on Tuesday and the rest of th e piece on Thursday. But even within a single work this can be useful. Let s say you re playing the 4th Ballade of Chopin a challenge to any pair of pianist s hands you might want just t o practise the the last five pages pages or so of of the piece on one day. Take an hour and just home-in on the specific difficulties there, calmly and coolly, then put it aside and work work on something else. It stops that feeling of being being overwhelmed by by how much needs working on; and if you practise that tricky coda carefully, out of context, it should feel more secure to play when the footlights are in full g lare and a microphone is poking its nose inside the piano. When you reach a hurdle in a difficult piece and stumble, keep going f or a few seconds. Dont stop and go back straightaway, because if you do this too often you will find that it will have become ingrained you will never have play ed the passage without this stopping and going back . An example of this this is in in the the final Chopin Prelude. There is a descending run of chromatic chromatic double-thirds double-thirds whi ch often causes problems. I ve heard this practised in conservatories over the yea rs the student gets to this point, gets in a tangle, stops for a second, and the n has another (usually more successful) successful) go. But by the time they come to play t he piece in an exam or concert they ve actually actually practised practised in the mistake. Not onl y should you keep going beyond the stumble before going back, but make sure when you do go back that you start a little earlier than the problem moment itself t o cover the crack. Very often getting getting into a passage is more difficult than the the passage itself. Some people are disdainful of the metronome as if using it means that you are somehow unmusical. This is really irrational as it can be a really useful tool to check tempos and to check steadiness of rhythm within those tempos, ena bling us then to be free to be free. But it has a further use in practising. Josef Lhevinne used to practise certain passages or pieces at four different tempos. Let s say your performance tempo is c rotchet (1/4 note) equals 120. Try practising at 100, 80 and 60. You ll find that different difficulties rear their heads at the four different tempos, and that t he middle two levels are often the hardest to maintain. This tip continues an idea which is related to my earlier post about m etronomes: don t feel you have to perform with full emotional expression at every practice session. session. Like an actor going over his or her lines backstage, sometime s its really good just to go through the paces thinking about what you want to do expressively, but but not fully fully engaging with it. This is especially valuable valuable on t he day of a concert: don t let the rehearsal use up all the energy for the perform
ance. Back to practising, and a suggestion about which I think I first read in the famous book by Heinrich Neuhaus, The Art of Piano Playing . It follows on f rom my last practice tip and the idea that good practising often means disengagi ng the emotion switch. If you take your foot off the pedal when you practise the sound instantly becomes semi-skimmed, and you ll really hear what s going on. You ll also see whether the fingering you ve chosen is lazy and a fudge, or whether it wi ll enable you to sing every line with fervour and confidence. Leopold Godowsky and Josef Lhevinne both recommended practising with eyes closed, and it s an astonishingly effective technique. It forces us to use o ur other senses more acutely hearing, of course, but also the feeling of the lay out, the geography of the keyboard. Its helpful for almost everything, but especially if you re working on a passage wi th jumps. If you can play Liszt s Mephisto Waltz no. 1 or Schumann s Fantasie op. 1 7 2nd movement with your eyes closed (even if it s at the speed of a tortoise with a missing leg) it will be that much easier when you open your eyes again. When learning a new piece I like to begin with writing in fingering. I take a sharpened pencil and get to work, examining every possible combination of digits for a passage, sometimes writing in a few alternatives. We can alway s change our minds later, but writing numbers alongside notes at the same point of learning those notes is an aid to memory in the present, to re-learning a sco re in the future, to security in a moment of concert nerves or jet lag and to re alizing what s really going on in the score. Like a learned rabbi poring over the Torah, we should study scores wi th alertness and fervour. Just slapping down any old fingers the ones which most easily come to hand until weve sort of learned the notes results in sloppy voice -leading, blurred counterpoint, and even misreadings. Also, as Artur Schnabel p ointed out, we should not just look for the easiest fingering but for the most m usical fingering one which matches the phrasing, which brings out the accents or inflections, or which allows a singing line to float along seamlessly. Related to my last practice tip post about writing fingerings into sc ores which I nearly always do with a simple graphite pencil, I like to use colou red pencils or inks to highlight particular points of interest: inner voices, im portant notes in harmonies, shapes of phrasings, patterns in passage-work, unusu al pedallings, aids for memory or just as a attention-grabbing tag when the page has become cluttered with all of the above.
I spoke in an earlier practice tip post about not warming up with a s pecial, fixed routine. But we can t (or perhaps shouldn t) just start playing the c adenza of Rachmaninov 3rd concerto, full-tilt, straight after breakfast. At hom e we can begin with less physically strenuous passages to loosen up, but what do we do when we re backstage at a concert hall with no piano on which to doodle? Ive spent many hours of my life drumming my fingers on table tops not whilst wait ing for a barman to bring over a martini, but nervously trying to get my fingers warm in a draughty dressing room. I don t think trying to play the patterns of a n actual piece is of much help, but taking simple, Hanon-like exercises tapped o ut on a hard surface (I ve used sinks, chairs, walls, music-stands, and water-mach ines) can be a good way to prepare for playing. I would add to this stretching and massage and not just our hands. We play the piano with wrists, arms, shoulders, backs (buttocks, thighs, knees ), and tightne ss anywhere can be a handicap at the keyboard. But just before a performance I like to tease out the knots in my forearms and between my thumbs and forefingers
. A good way to do this is to take a non-sharp corner of a piece of furniture a nd gently press on the various pressure points. You don t want to do heavy massag e immediately before playing as the muscles will become tender, but a light push ing against the tension can be very beneficial. Trills The guiding principle is evenness. If a trill is even in volume and in the rhyth mic space between the notes it will sound good. This may seem like an obvious po int, but trills frequently sound lame and lumpy because one of these aspects is missing. In particular, pianists often try to play trills too quickly. A slow, e ven trill will sound faster in a hall than a rapid, uneven one. It is also possi ble for a trill to sound louder if it is played slower: there is literally more time (if only a quarter of a second) to address the vertical stoke of finger pre ssure on key. A good fingering is a crucial aspect of this. Josef Lhevinne had a nice saying i n support of using alternate fingers (1&3, 2&4, or 3&5): neighbours don t like each other. There is a physiological element involved here: neighbouring fingers shar e tendons and muscles, and so trilling with 3&4 is an inefficient employment of the hands natural design. But the real issue is a technical one: except for short , decorative ornaments, trills are best executed on the piano with wrist rather than fingers. If you trill with the thumb and the 3rd finger (probably the best all-round choice for a strong, even trill) then these digits should remain almos t still with a low-held wrist, rocking left and right, supplying all the motion. There is tremendous power in this sort of trill, and endurance. I am still in Bergen, in the middle of recording both Liszt concertos with the B ergen Philharmonic and Andrew Litton. At the end of the slow section of the 1st concerto there is a lyrical trill lasting two pages (see above). With a relaxed arm and a gently rotating wrist it should be possible to continue this embellish ment for at least two further pages without tiring. This topic is a reminder tha t when audience members ask to see a pianist s hands they should really ask to see his wrists, forearms, elbows (especially), shoulders, and feet too for they all have an essential part to play when seated in front of the keyboard of a piano. 1) If a trill (say, from B to C) is causing you problems try thinking it downwar ds (from C to B). 2) As well as slowing down your trills to gain evenness, try measuring the short er ones in exact numbers of notes. We sometimes think a measured trill will soun d stiff, but any trill does actually have a finite number of notes; sometimes it can be useful to decide on that number before playing. 3) Starting a trill can be tricky. Try starting the trill slightly slower and ma king an accelerando but this should be imperceptible. 4) Ditto with ending a trill. Sometimes we can swallow the endings of trills and create a lump. 5) Experiment with fingerings. It can be good sometimes to start with 13231323 a nd then switch to 1313. 6) If you want to make a diminuendo in a strong 1313 trill, try switching to 121 2. This automatically makes the rotating movement of the wrist less wide thus au tomatically reducing the trill s volume. Double Trilles: Firstly there is no substitute for strong, independent, well-developed fingers. Then there is the problem of the natural inequality of those fingers because the re will always be weak and strong digits having to work together. If the top lin
e of the trill is melodic, and in the right hand, then weaker fingers will have to bear the burden. The next problem is the rotation of the wrist because it s har der to achieve when the thumb is not an isolated stump against which our other fin gers can rock. In fact, the wrist action is up and down rather than side to side with double-note trills. Many of the principles I wrote about with regular tril ls (speed and evenness, fingers and wrists, mental tricks) are even more helpful here especially measuring the exact number of notes. With such unison passages, where both hands are playing the same fast notes an o ctave apart, try practising them two octaves apart. It will wrong-foot you at fi rst, but it will make the patterns more secure and will enable you to hear both voices more clearly. So when you play any passage in any piece it's worth considering where is the mo st efficient place to sit. You will usually need to change places throughout the piece but never feel you have to be glued to the centre.
