Innehållsförteckning för 131 från Pianist

For over 20 years we have been bringing you fantastic scores to learn and giving you the chance to hear the music on our exclusive CD. Due to commercial realities in the UK and across the globe, the CD will no longer be attached to newsstand copies. Newsstand readers – don’t despair, though. There are still ways that you can access the tracks: 1 BECOME A SUBSCRIBER! The CD comes free with all subscriber copies – no matter where you are in the world. 2 Stream the album on Spotify. This issue’s album can be found at pianistm.ag/spotify. Alternatively, just search for ‘Pianist Magazine’ in the Spotify search bar. 3 Write to me at editor@pianistmagazine.com, with your full name and address, and we’ll post the CD out to you. NOTE:…

Repertoire Let’s discuss the most fun part of the job first: deciding on the repertoire! There’s so much to choose from, and whether you’re entering the Modern or the Classical category, you’ll have to narrow it down to about two to three pieces. It goes without saying that if you want to play to your best ability, choose the piece(s) that you love! Are you better at Baroque rather than Classical? Do you feel more ‘at home’ with the gushier Romantic repertoire? What are your strong (and weak) points? You need to bear all of this in mind. Then, if you have a teacher, talk it over with them. When it comes to your playing, they’ll know you way better than you do. Whilst in the throes of choosing the…

Isn’t it frustrating when a piece you’ve been practising for a while and feel like you know well comes adrift in performance? It’s one thing to be able to play for yourself in the comfort of your own space, and quite another to perform in front of others (how often have I heard students claim in a lesson that they can play it perfectly at home?). Even if only playing for yourself, do you also sometimes feel that your results fall short of what you would like to achieve? One common cause of this problem is that many players rely on simply repeating a piece over and over until the physical movements become habitual, creating the illusion that the piece has been successfully mastered. Unless we are exceptionally confident in…

Key C minor Tempo Allemande Style Baroque Will improve your ✓ Voicing ✓ Articulation ✓ Phrasing Bach’s six French Suites are seen as easier and shorter than the composer’s English Suites or Partitas. And that’s what makes them such effective teaching music. The Allemande, or originally a German dance, was once a staple component of the keyboard suite. Often used as the opening of a multi-movement series of stylised dances, it set the scene for what was to follow. The present Allemande is no exception. The Allemande is not a fast dance. The most important thing is to deduce the tempo from the texture of the music. The fastest notes, the demisemiquavers, should flow without sounding rushed. Work backwards from this pace to determine the underlying crotchet speed. Some detailed…

Sharing the music we love in public with others is a wonderful thing to do. All of the add-on excitement associated with that, including the possibilities of playing in a large hall on a concert instrument and seeing your name on a programme, can be exhilarating in the most positive sense. But thrills can easily morph into proverbial spills as joy changes to anxiety and stress, even terror, as the day of the performance comes closer. This can lead to much unpleasantness, with stage fright, loss of control and post-performance blues adding insult to injury. When do we start to prepare our pupils for performances, whether they be in exams, competitions, recitals, collaborative work or concertos? The answer is ‘now’! Don’t wait until pieces are up and running. Begin in…

I’m considering buying a new piano. I’ve bought a few pianos in my time and have worked up a range of tests to help separate good from bad. So here I am in a showroom, surrounded by lots of new ones, ranging from budget uprights to super-expensive grands. I am welcome to try as many as I like, says the sales person. I sit at a likely looking instrument and play a few pieces to get some initial impressions. Showpieces over, I rattle off a few scales, each becoming louder to hear how much dynamic variety the instrument can supply. Next, I strike and hold down random notes, listening to the length of their decay, an indicator of a piano’s ability to ‘sing’. I play some bass notes, listening for…

A mazurka is a characteristic dance from Mazovia, the region of Poland where Chopin grew up, and there is a nationalist pride evident in his mazurkas – the ‘Vivo e risoluto’ marking here suggests something defiant. This Mazurka is the first of a set of four written in Paris in 1832-33, and sounds quite heroic from the outset, although like most of Chopin’s many mazurkas (some 50 of them in all), there is a contrasting sorrowful section before a return to the bold mazurka mood. Playing tips: In order to get the right feeling for a mazurka, you need to have the rhythm spot on. In a mazurka, the accent has to be on the second or third beat (see the accents throughout the score), unlike a waltz, where the…

Congratulations to Steve Langford from Christchurch, UK, who has won a Kawai piano. Langford wowed the judges with his 56-bar composition, Fairytale. A long-term subscriber to Pianist, Langford is retired, having enjoyed a career in telecoms engineering. During his early years he received some help from his brother on the rudiments of notation, but he was mainly self-taught, learning by ear. ‘I was always attracted to the piano. I took some evening classes in piano and theory later on in my twenties, but work left little time to practise. Now that I’ve retired I spend pretty much all my time at the piano. I always thought I had some musical ability, and though I don’t consider myself much of a pianist, I do enjoy composing.’ Langford entered last year’s competition…

TAP TO WATCH Rafał Blechacz plays Chopin mazurkas TAP TO WATCH Rafał Blechacz’s 2005 winning performance of Chopin Concerto No 1 TAP TO WATCH Rafał Blechacz plays Chopin Concerto No 2 Ariver runs through Rafal Blechacz’s hometown of Nakło nad Notecią – the river Noteć – and Chopin is the river running through the pianist’s career. He lives on the outskirts of that town, close to his family, in a house he recently bought with the profits of that career, which was launched at the age of 20 by winning the 2005 International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. Deutsche Grammophon snapped him up without delay, and Blechacz has gone on to record a clutch of albums for the label, including the music of Bach, Mozart, Debussy and Szymanowski, but…

Thanks to the tireless efforts of a number of exemplary performers in recent years – not least pianist Mark Viner – the not insubstantial output for piano of Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944) is more widely available than ever before. Before I heard Viner’s album, I was familiar only with her much more well-known (and wonderful) Flute Concertino Op 107, but her piano compositions have been a fresh and joyful discovery. In each of her finely-crafted Romances sans Paroles Op 76 she conjures compelling moods, each overflowing with lyrically romantic beauty and pianistic invention. It is to the final work of the set, Méditation, that I devote this article. It is technically accessible to most amateurs, although, as with many romantic miniatures, it opens the door to an exciting adventure into musical…

JEAN-EFFLAM BAVOUZET Mozart Piano Concertos Vol 7: C minor K491 & C major K503 Manchester Camerata/Takács-Nagy  Chandos CHAN20192 Volume 7 in Bavouzet’s series reaches Mozart’s most ambitiously symphonic concertos, a yin-and-yang pair (C minor/major), like K466 and K467, both of them written in 1786 and imbued with the all-too-human world of the revolutionary operas he was writing at the time with Lorenzo da Ponte. Drawing on the immense Mozartian experience of his conductor, Bavouzet is able to craft intensely collaborative readings, in which bassoon and oboe chafe and chunter like Basilio to the piano’s right-hand Figaro in the turbulent K491. Both slow movements approach the dream ideal of concerto as chamber music without ever bathing in reverie. The cadenzas tease and draw the ear on: Hummel extemporizing in K491,…

EMAIL: editor@pianistmagazine.com WRITE TO: The Editor, Pianist,Warners Group Publications, The Maltings, West St, Bourne, PE10 9PH. Letters may be edited. Trills for thrills I am learning Bach’s French Suite No 6, and am now on the third movement, the Sarabande. My question is how to play the trills in this rather dramatic little piece. As an organist, I was taught to play Bach and other Baroque trills by beginning on the note above the starting note given in the score with the trill being played fairly slowly. Do I adopt the same technique with the piano? If I start on the given note I have to finish with a triplet at the end of the trill. This is not needed when playing the starting note above the given note.…

As we flick through a piece we’re busily learning, we easily become distracted by the score’s trickier, more involved looking passages and perhaps less concerned with how the music starts and ends. But for the listener, how these bars are played can be so important, both emotionally and structurally. Composers give much thought to how their music majestically springs to life (for example, Grieg’s Piano Concerto) or else meanders more intriguingly into existence as if from a thought that was already planted in our minds (like Chopin’s Prélude in E minor). At least as much consideration is given to how best the music should wind up – whether enigmatically, such as Satie’s Gymnopédie No 1, or emphatically at the end of a sprawling, tumultuous journey, like Beethoven’s Sonata Op 110.…

Key F major Tempo Andantino Style Late Romantic Will improve your ✓ Finger substitution ✓ Voicing ✓ Legato Dedication is an elegant, lyrical and expressive work. Consisting of a predominantly three-part texture, a smooth legato touch will allow the charming melody to unfold effectively. The RH contains two parts: The top part is the melody which floats above the texture, and this is combined with a triplet quaver accompaniment figure as the lower part. The fairly sparse LH bass line provides the solid harmonic foundation. Structured in four-bar phrases, try a calm tempo of a crotchet = 60. Separate hand practice is always a good way to begin learning. Whilst seemingly straightforward, the LH does occasionally feature two parts, requiring the sustaining of certain notes. Look at bars 9-12,…

Czerny Progressive Studies Op 139 No 30 Practise this study slowly and with rhythmic accuracy – always allowing more hand/finger weight on the dotted quaver. Narcisa FREIXAS (1859-1926) La dansa Barcelona-born sculptor, painter and composer Narcisa Freixas (1859- 1926) studied the piano with Juan Bautista Pujol, who numbered Enrique Granados among his pupils. She published collections of Catalan songs and nursery rhymes. Look at the technical tips. Janette MASON & James THOMPSON Lullaby LISTEN HERE: pianistm.ag/lullabypiece Notes from the composers: Lullaby is an original composition from Relaxing Piano, a collection of 15 solo piano pieces by Piano Hive composers Janette Mason and James Thompson. The piece has a gentle, repetitive melody in a major key set against a syncopated LH part. There is only an initial dynamic marking of mp,…

FAURÉ Romances sans paroles Op 17 Bärenreiter This edition of the three Romances is taken from the third of three volumes devoted to Fauré’s solo piano music in Bärenreiter’s ongoing project to publish the composer’s complete works. They were written whilst Fauré was still a student, yet were not published until 1880, 20 years after their composition. At around Grade 7-8 and three to five pages long, these resemble Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words in their length, difficulty, and melodious character. An appendix containing the first version of the popular Third Romance is included, which differs most notably from the final version in the texture of the left hand. No fingering is included, whilst only original pedalling indications (which are limited to No 1) are printed. SAINT-SAËNS Six Etudes pour la…

It is the Op 17 mazurkas of 1833, while Chopin was a Parisian celebrity, that establish a new model which would influence composers for generations to come, in marrying elements of folk music with sophisticated devices of art music: a refined nationalism that would find its home in both salons and concert-halls across Europe. Playing tips: This is a slow mazurka with a sad lilt to it. Take time over some of the RH melody notes such as the accented D at the start of bar 2. Bars 5-6 need a light touch; bear in mind that Chopin’s rubato always requires a steady pulse in the LH. Even the most florid phrases (at points such as bar 23) require melodically sensitive shaping. The middle section (bars 25-53) should press on…