Summary: if you have the opportunity to go you should. This tour is already one of the iconic ones and will be spoken about for years.
I struggle to describe the experience. Watching him was like watching many very different people; from a teenage boy, from a gaming nerd, from a middle aged woman, to the 40 year old man, to a church organist. All there on the stage before me.
I’ve never seen an audience so tense (apart from the coughing men, that is). Pure silence waiting for the last vibrations of closing notes to die away. Many different sounds from the one Steinway D on the stage. Perfectly controlled voices. It really was extraordinary.
I’m kind of fascinated by piano magazines. I regularly pick up Pianist if I can, and here in Belgium, Pianiste (in French) turns up every once in a while. I’m keeping an eye out for something in Dutch. However, a couple of weeks ago I picked up two German magazines and they differed from the French and English publications in one very critical way and that was the lack of sheet music. Neither German magazine provided scores.
In itself, this is not such a bad thing (although there tends to be a really nice choice of music and guidance for same in the French and English magazines) but it was unusual. On the other hand, Germany seems to have a lot of sheet music shops and there is always IMSLP.
One of the articles which caught my eye in one of them was an article on the place of the piano in the life and writing of Jane Austen. For me that was interesting: it mentioned that [like me] she played a lot of Scottish and Irish dance melodies, gave an overview of where the piano cropped up in the novels. Of course, having more or less learned Pride & Prejudice by heart, you cannot fail to see the place of the piano in the society of that book, on several levels, Lizzie Bennett’s tendency not to practice, her sister Mary’s desperation to practice and show off, and of course, the piano bought by Mr Darcy for his sister. But equally, in the Emma, there is the question of the piano delivered to Jane Fairfax. Writing of that nature is not something I happen across very often. Very much more tends to be on current pianists and repertoire, so some essays on the place of piano in society is really interesting.
The other highlight was the vast number of release reviews which, where possible, includes the model of the chosen piano. I’ll do a piece of data analysis on that later.
I’m interested in any more piano magazines in EN, FR, DE, NL or ES, all of which I have a fighting chance of reading.
I spend a certain amount of time on the internet like every young woman of my age and lately a good chunk of that is on r/piano. Sometimes it’s interesting and occasionally, it feeds my soul with new music. But there are recurring themes and one of those themes is the value of Ludovico Einaudi’s music.
These discussions tend to be polarising. It is clear that an element of the music world seems to despise what he does; they have the right. Taste is very subjective. You see a similar reaction to one of the key pieces from the movie Amelie as well; it’s obvious that many people look down on it. I understand that people might not like the music. I don’t like Bartok and my tolerance for Prokofiev can be a bit limited on the piano side although there is some orchestral stuff which is mindblowing.
But here’s the point: it’s one thing not to like music and quite another thing to look down on the composer. Einaudi is dismissed as too simple, too simplistic, not very sophisticated often by people who deign not to play any of his music. I tend to disagree. In one respect, Einaudi touches many, many more people playing the piano that many classical interpreters of the time.
I’ve often felt that the critic minded world of art, writing and music have missed a key factor in the objective of art, writing and music – they do not exist in a vacuum separate from an audience. I will freely admit that I can sit alone to the world at a piano and play music to my hearts content but ultimately if I want to do it professionally, I need something that a lot of people are going to buy. My audience is never going to be the critics who take a more gate keeping approach to music.
Meanwhile, we constantly bemoan how few people are interested in learning music. It’s ironic really.
Einaudi has made the piano very popular. His sheet music is selling. His concerts are selling out. His music is touching the hearts of a lot of people. If your argument against that is that his audience is unsophisticated, then I think you are somehow missing the point. Music remains popular over 100s of years because it taps into people’s hearts. For this reason I’m not sure it’s safe to say he will be completely forgotten. People’s times come and go.
I haven’t learned any of his pieces through. I’ve worked on one (Una Mattina) from time to time; it’s readable and it feels beautiful to play. I’ve heard one or two classical pianists acknowledge that their views on his music started to change when they actually started playing his music. I find that interesting. It suggests sometimes that the self styled sophisticates who look down on modern piano music that is targeted at the masses are perhaps in themselves not adequately sophisticated to understand the appeal of music that is targeted at being heard and enjoyed rather than being challenging.
One of the things I love about Tiersen’s music for the film Amelie is even today – twenty plus years after the movie came out – it is inspiring teenagers to play the piano.
I kind of think that’s more important than forcing Mikrokosmos on kids who don’t want to learn it. The objective of learning music is not to be the greatest pianist on the planet; there isn’t ever going to be one despite the regular arguments I see again on r/piano. It’s about giving people pleasure in the activity so that they do it all their life. There are health benefits to playing an instrument especially as people get older.
It’s not different to sport: disregarding the kids who are not going to win your school medals means you are failing those kids who need healthy habits for their lives.
In this context, I wonder how much more credibility Einaudi might have with the criterati if he was just less successful.
I bought some more sheet music yesterday; all from Henle so all with the distinctive blue covers, so I will skip the photos for this.
Brahms Opus 76
Brahms Opus 119
Liszt Sonata in B minor
Brahms Ballades
I have bought a crazy amount of sheet music and that doesn’t include the pieces I also pull from IMSLP to whom I intend to give some money soon. I know deep down that until I get past the necessary block I have with one of the exam pieces I am learning, I will not do anything more than tip away at bits of these collections. I bought the Liszt Sonata – a piece I never expect to even start learning in its completeness simply because I love the second movement.
But it’s nice to dream and I Feel No Guilt about this. However.
I need to tidy the sheet music into some sort of usable system so that I can find it more easily. This involves bookshelf reorganisation. I dread it, I already have piles of actual books around the place. The oldest sheet music I possess is in Ireland and the oldest that I have here is my copy of Rach II which I bought in about 1988. So it’s like, 35 years old. I take care of my music and even my exam books are in pretty decent nick given that they cost one or two pounds also around 35 years ago variously. Yes I know it seems crazy that someone working grade 4 or 5 also bought Rach 2. But I like dreaming of the possible and I’m never going to forgive the people who focus on how hard something will be instead of how motivated I am. I still can’t play bits of it but I totally get lost in it when I am working on pieces of it just for the pure pleasure of doing so. The journey matters not the end. Anyway, I digress. The Liszt cropped up on Igor Levit’s latest album; I have quite a few bits of Liszt that were bought to be read rather than played. A bit like Islamey by Balakirev. I’m not even going to try. Okay. Back to the objective.
I have a mix of music: a lot of so called classical – basically written 100 or more years ago – and more modern stuff like Tiersen, Arnalds and Einaudi. I’m going to write about Einaudi after I am done with this. I bought mag boxes to store them in because they are mostly not hardback and the music can be fragile and when you don’t have a lot of it, mag boxes keep it somewhat safe. Now I am thinking that the alphabet is going to have to be my friend and that I will just have to sort that way. But I want to keep a mag box aside for the kind of loose single piece sheets and also for the Grade 6 and Grade 8 piano pieces. Currently the 6 is cluttering my piano. I want to declutter my piano but that’s going to be challenging as I’ve all sorts of tools and notes there. I also have the free stuff that came with the piano (stuff that includes Burgmuller and Chopin plus a couple of collections of Various). So there needs to be a collections section as well. I also tended to sort by publisher which was fine when most of it was Henle. Most of it still is but I’d prefer to sort by composer now that a bit more Barenreiter is coming in and I bought the Chopin Institute’s issue of the Chopin Sonatas.
So I’m writing about doing this instead of doing it which is…an interesting bit of procrastination.
Chenyin Li plays Rustle of Spring by Christian Sinding
Someone mentioned to me that they liked this piece today so I went looking. It’s in Pianist 102 which I don’t have but it is also on IMSLP so now I do have it as well, all ten pages of it.
It’s in D flat. My all time favourite key. Having then wandered into Sinding Google Exploration I wound up with this by Cecile Chaminade.
Autumn by Cecile Chaminade
This is also in D flat. I need to work in that key anyway thanks to Rach but anyway…,
Alexandre Tharaud is one of my favourite pianists and he might get me to go listen to these Ravel concertos although Ravel is tainted in my mind by the Bolero which turns up in the figure skating world a lot (although for the 23-24 season, Kevin Aymoz is worth a look),
Anyway, even Argerich couldn’t get me to give much time to Ravel – it doesn’t talk to me in general. But Tharaud has a magical touch.
If you check under my objectives, you’ll see I’m currently working Grade 6. I wonder sometimes how valid it is that I write a piano blog when I am stuck firmly in the intermediate box as far as classical repertoire is concerned.
I had trouble selecting the List A piece at the time. I was surprised; I thought the List C would be harder but I found recordings of some of them, liked the first one I heard, and off we went.
Out of the four pieces, the Bach is KILLING me. Well, some of it is incredibly easy. The rest of it is killing me. In part, this is a gap in my education. I don’t align so much with Bach as I do with Chopin and Rachmananinininininininoff or indeed Felix. This is not the kind of thing you admit out loud in the piano world. Bach is 42, the answer to life, the universe and everything.
The one piece of Bach that everyone knew (well I never played it but I could pull it out by ear if I really wanted to) turned out to be composed by someone else (Christian Petzold in this case, apparently). The only piece I truly liked was the Toccata and Fugue although Sky might have something to do with that.
It’s worth digging out an organ version too. But that’s not where we are right now.
I want to do the exam performance in February or March in 2024 so I need to get a move on with Bach. I don’t know the Rebikov but I can sight read it without too much difficulty. Learning it by heart is the challenge there and I’m already at a stage where I can deal with thinking about how I want it to sound. But the Bach had been a traincrash and more to the point, Apple’s music search meant I turned up very little when I went looking for a recording of it, at least initially. Once I discovered that looking for Angela Hewitt would be more productive, things got better. I’m now more motivated to learn the Bach because I’ve realised it is a stepping stone to the Rameau that I want to do for Grade 8. So back to Bach we went.
I’m stuck in the middle of the first part. Henle tells me this is easier than the Mendelssohn that while it was a swamp inhabited by dragons from a fingering point of view, it was also readable from day one. I won’t say it was easy to get right but it was easy to motivate myself to pick it apart and start putting it back together.
I don’t believe Henle. Maybe it’s easier if you started playing Petzold instead of a music hall version of the Rose of Tralee, aged 10 (god knows why we had it) but if you’ve somehow got to the age of 50 without doing any counterpoint at all, Bach is a big thick brick wall.
Bach, Two Part Invention in E major
In particular, I’m struggling with the highlighted bars above. Well, the first of them is okay after a great deal of very slow work and repetition. Yes, I have been using a metronome, at length, much to the pity of my neighbours no doubt. But it is very very slow going. I’m operating under the fatal excess optimism that once I manage that, then much of the rest of it being easier than the Mendelssohn might materialise.
On the plus side, it’s a decent enough piece of Bach, and I’ve also spent some time with the C Major Prelude from WTC lately, and I’ve had a look at Aria from the Goldberg Variations. I bought a copy of Anna Maria Bach’s notebook as well (and it has the Petzold in it too which is handy and now I am wondering about getting CPE Bach’s notebook too). And I really, really hope it helps with the Rameau.
In other news, I will see the Goldbergs courtesy of Vikingur Olafsson next week. I am looking forward to it.
I found myself myself in a secondhand bookstore today looking at their sheet music collection. It was…disappointing in a way but exhilarating that two second hand bookshops in Brussels have sheet music. Today, you were quids in if you played the violin, the electric organ or the clarinet. Actually I assume that if you play the clarinet, it must be quite wonderful to fall over the odd bit of clarinet music anywhere, nevermind a shop more used to selling fiction and comic strips.
Anyway, times were thin on the piano music but I picked up two pieces, one being a duplicate (of more anon) and the other being by Guastavino whose music I had to order specially lately (I haven’t started the piece yet). He is not yet out of copyright but is difficultly in print. I’m not sure what this will be like but I bought it anyway.
Bailecito by Carlos Guastavino
What struck me about it was that each page was stamped with what looks like a publisher’s mark.
Anyway. I have it.
As a teenager, aside from Rach II, a couple of pieces of cinema music seared through my mind, one of which was Richard Adinsell’s Warsaw Concerto from the movie Dangerous Moonlight. As I mostly found classical music through figure skating at that time, I assume that’s where I picked that up from. Anyway, we found a recording, probably on Naxos at some point, but the sheet music eluded me for years and years and years and years. In fact, I only picked a new copy of it sometime in the last 2 years since Pointe d’Orgue became known to me (one of the two sheet music shops that I trust in Brussels. I ordered the Guastivino mentioned above from the other, Brauer. I know them both. Anyway, Pointe d’Orgue had the Adinsell so after a near 25 year search I had it in my hands.
One of the fascinating things for me with orchestral piano music is that you can get lots of it and it all has an accompaniment for a second piano or is a reduction for 2 pianos. So the Hummel I picked up last week was a bit of a novelty. Anyway, today’s haul includes Warsaw Concerto, or more specifically, Concerto de Varsovie, solo piano.
Warsaw Concerto, French publication, Richard Adinsell
If you’re looking for a good recording of it, I’m inclined to suggest Jean Yves Thibaudet. You can have a listen on Youtube here.
Jean Yves Thibaudet pushing out into the dead of night
Actually, I went looking for a trailer for the film Dangerous Moonlight which I have never seen and instead, I found this. The music is very clearly the star and yet, it’s completely different to any recording I have ever heard of it.
Anyway, they cost almost nothing. The total I spent in the shop was 5 euro 50 cents and in addition to the sheet music there was a kids book and a how to draw ballet dancers book.
When I got home I went to my “keep these safe” documents where I thought there was a copy of the piano solo of the Legend of the Glass Mountain by Nina Rota. Apparently I have put it somewhere even safer.
This is something I’ve been looking for almost as long; and I found a copy of it in the Sheet Music Library in the Central Library in Dublin about 30 years ago having searched for a while for it. No dice but I seemed to acquire a photocopy of it. I never got around to learning it but it’s still on my TBL list. I see a copy of it on eBay though which will post to Belgium so I am going to rectify that.
I’m interested in second hand sheet music sources. Point me at them.
