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40 PAGES OF SHEET MUSIC!

WORTH OVER £20 + FREE AUDIO CD

OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 2020

HELPING YOU BECOME A BETTER PLAYER

No 116

HOW TO

VÍKINGUR ÓLAFSSON

CONQUER REPEATED NOTES

MUSICIAN OF OUR TIMES

Masterclass PRACTISING TIPS

Bringing out the

How to refine your pieces

INNER MELODIES

MIND OVER MATTER

Why playing the piano is good for your health

LUSIVforE CONTENT EXCGuidance IN-DEPTH GUIDANCE

Mozart’s popular

19

50

PiECES TO

MINuteS of

LEARN

MUSIC

Allegro K3

PUT YOUR Instinct, or EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW FEET hard work?UP!

3 WATERMAN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Practising without DAME FANNY the pedal

HOURS of

100 years young

VIDEO

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“If I am to play my best, there is no way but Steinway.” LANG LANG S T E I N WAY A R T I S T

Steinway Hall London W1U 2DB For more information or to arrange a private appointment at our London showrooms, please call: 0207 487 3391 or email [email protected]

2• Pianist 103

Pianist 116

CONTENTS

October-November 2020 The next issue of Pianist goes on sale 20 November 2020

10

72

68

4

Editor’s Note

4

Reader Competition Three readers to receive a vinyl copy of our cover star’s latest album

6

Readers’ Letters Tuning under pressure, Ave Maria bliss and learning to perform

20 How to Play 1 Melanie Spanswick brings the insects to life in Chadwick’s The Cricket and the Bumblebee (Scores p30)

8

Bertrand Chamayou The charismatic Frenchman on his latest album of lullabies both relaxing and restless

21 How to Play 2 There are many decisions to be made in Scarlatti’s delightful Sonata in F K106, says Nils Franke (Scores p48)

Product News A peek preview of the latest range of Clavinovas from Yamaha

22 How to Play 3 For Lucy Parham, it’s all about learning the central part first in Liszt’s glorious On Wings of Song (Scores p60)

9

10 Víkingur Ólafsson The ‘Viking’ from Iceland on Rameau, cameras and being creative during lockdown 14 How to Play Masterclass 1 Struggling to project the inner voice within the music? Mark Tanner shows you how

16 How to Play Masterclass 2 Graham Fitch presents Part 2 of his masterclass on organising practice time

24 Beginner Keyboard Class Lesson 43: Repeated notes 26 The Scores A pristine Mozart minuet, a classic Gershwin song, a Fauré Improvisation, and a deluge of Alkan

67 Piano Teacher Help Desk As face-to-face lessons resume, Kathryn Page urges us not to throw away the things we’ve learnt during lockdown 68 Pianists and their Teachers Warwick Thompson studies some celebrated teacher/student relationships, both past and present, to find out what truly makes an outstanding teacher 72 Addicted to Alkan Mark Viner pays tribute to the composer with a colourful tour of his life and music – with hot tips on the three Alkan pieces inside 78 Mental Health Taking a closer look at how our favourite instrument can aid our wellbeing 82 Sheet Music Reviews Meditative music from Schott, Beethoven Sonatas from Henle, and further sight-reading help from Faber’s Paul Harris

Cover image and top, centre: © Ari Magg Notice: Every effort has been made to secure permission for copyrighted material in this magazine, however, should copyrighted material inadvertently have been used, copyright acknowledgement will be made in a later issue of the magazine.

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Guiding lights

Pianist

Towards the end of this unusual summer I enjoyed listening to archive broadcasts of BBC Proms. One concert which had me on the edge of my seat was a 1997 Prom – the first solo piano recital in the festival’s history – given by Evgeny Kissin. It touched me to learn from the presenter’s introduction that Kissin’s teacher – Anna Kantor, of the Gnessin Academy in Moscow – had been in the audience that day. Kantor has followed her pupil ever since his feet could reach the pedals, almost as a member of the family. Her influence over him has been immense. As the beneficiary of selfless dedication, Kissin is hardly alone. Warwick Thompson’s feature (p68) explores the history of great pianists and their teachers, beginning with Carl Czerny (pupil of Beethoven, teacher of Liszt). As a young man, Emil Gilels was already a prize-winning virtuoso, but it was in the care of Heinrich Neuhaus that he developed the touch and poetry for which he is remembered today. Stephen Hough remembers his teacher Gordon Green and Leon McCawley pays tribute to Eleanor Sokoloff, the legendary professor at the Curtis Institute who died in July. Several regular Pianist contributors can point to an equally distinguished lineage. Graham Fitch took lessons with Peter Feuchtwanger, who also coached Shura Cherkassky and Martha Argerich. Both Lucy Parham and Chenyin Li studied with Joan Havill, the long-serving Guildhall School professor who counts Paul Lewis and Sa Chen among her many other students. Bringing us full circle, I studied at the Manhattan School of Music, where I first met Graham Fitch. We were both in the class of Nina Svetlanova, who had trained at the Gnessin. However, learning and listening can take place well beyond the confines of the teaching studio. Our cover artist Víkingur Ólafsson explains how Gilels’s recordings have helped him to sculpt a singing line at the piano. At a time when schools and conservatoires are reopening and finding new ways to continue their work, it’s more important than ever to continue the cycle of listening and learning. If you’re a teacher running your own practice, do write in and let us know how you have adapted to the ‘new normal’.

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EDITORIAL Warners Group Publications 31-32 Park Row, 5th Floor, Leeds LS1 5JD Editor: Erica Worth [email protected] Tel: +44 (0)20 7266 0760 Editorial Assistant & Online Editor: Ellie Palmer [email protected] Marketing: Lauren Freeman [email protected] Senior Designer: Nathan Ward ADVERTISING Mark Dean, Advertising Manager [email protected] Tel: +44 (0)1778 395084 Mobile: +44 (0)7503 707023

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WIN VÍKINGUR ÓLAFSSON’S DEBUSSY & RAMEAU ALBUM Answer the question below correctly, and you could be one of three lucky winners to receive a vinyl copy of Víkingur Ólafsson’s Debussy and Rameau album from Deutsche Grammophon. Deadline for entries: 20 November 2020 La fille aux cheveux de lin is from which set of Debussy works: A. Préludes B. Estampes C. Images © Benjamin Ealovega

PUBLISHER Warners Group Publications plc Director: Stephen Warner Publisher: Collette Lloyd

Answer to page 4 competition in issue 114: C: Op 25 No 11. Congratulations to winners David Cooke (Dundee), Elaine Hopton (Shropshire), Carl Holloway (London)

ENTER ONLINE AT WWW.PIANISTMAGAZINE.COM 4• Pianist 116

FOR ALL OTHER ENQUIRIES Contact: Collette Lloyd, Publisher Warners Group Publications Fifth Floor, 31-32 Park Row, Leeds, LS1 5JD, UK Tel: +44 (0)113 200 2929 Fax: +44 (0)113 200 2928 Registered Address: Warners Group Publications,West Street, Bourne, Lincs, PE10 9PH. © Warners Group Publications plc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission strictly prohibited. Every care is taken in compiling the magazine and no responsibility can be taken for any action arising from information given on the papers. All information, prices and telephone numbers are correct at the time of going to press. No responsibility can be taken for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs or transparencies. Printed by Warners Group Publications plc. PIANIST, ISSN 1475 - 1348 is published bi-monthly (six times a year in February, April, June, August, October, December) by Warners Group Publications c/o Express Mag, 12 Nepco Way, Plattsburgh, NY, 12903. Periodicals Postage paid at Plattsburgh, NY. POSTMASTER: send address changes to PIANIST c/o Express Mag, P.O. box 2769, Plattsburgh, NY 12901-0239.

ISSN 1475 - 1348

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The Futur e of the Pi a no

5• Pianist 101

LETTERS

Your chance to

HAVE YOUR SAY EMAIL: [email protected] WRITE TO: The Editor, Pianist, Warners Group Publications, 31-32 Park Row, Leeds, LS1 5JD. Letters may be edited.

Learning to perform I was delighted to read about the EPTA Festivals project inside Pianist 113 [www. epta-uk.org]. I have been running a festival for almost 30 years based at Somerset College on the Gold Coast, with the same ethos – it is all about learning to perform – and getting a positive boost from one’s hard work, with acknowledgement of the effort. At this stage, we only run the festival on one weekend based around junior performers (up to 14 years) but use up to ten venues at times, with up to some 3,000 entries in music and speech. I am so pleased to see the turn from the overcompetitiveness which often detracts from the emphasis on making music. Well done! Helen Little, Gold Coast, Australia Dangerous tuning Earlier this week, I had the piano tuner at home for a more than overdue (delayed due to Covid-19) tuning of my grand piano. The piano tuner had been working for about 30 minutes when the building fire alarm sounded. He refused

to evacuate the building because he said if he interrupts the tuning, it would damage the piano (which less than a year old). I assume this has to do with the string tension on the frame, but could not find an explanation online. I was worried to leave him behind while evacuating the building, but luckily, it was a false alarm. I’d be curious to know if someone in your team can confirm (or not) that piano tuning should not be interrupted.... unless your life is in danger. Suzanne Laplante, Montreal, Canada We have spoken to our experts, and they seem puzzled by your tuner’s response. It’s absolutely fine to interrupt a tuning and return to it again after a short while. If a piano is seriously flat, by a semitone or more, a tuner might not wish to interrupt the flow of the tuning. But in your case, seeing the instrument is only a year old, it would seem highly unlikely for the piano to have been that flat. Hence, your tuner should have evacuated the building, then resumed work when safely back inside.

2021

Composing Competition

Compose your own piece and

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www.pianistmagazine.com Entry closes Friday 4 December 2020 6• Pianist 116

Heavens above As soon as I received issue 115 and noticed it had a piano duet version of Bach/Gounod’s Ave Maria, I rushed to listen to the track whilst following the score. What a thrilling piece! Each tension in the chord gives me the shivers, while the resolution to the dominant brings me instant tranquillity! I could not help but notice that the recording contains an unexpected ornament in the penultimate bar of the Secondo part. It is a very subtle trill, not indicated in the score, before the resolution to the dominant. A different version or an impromptu gift of the interpreter? Antonio Campello, London Duo Worbey and Farrell respond: You are right to notice the ornament. This is an embellishment that we’ve added ourselves and we’re pleased you approve. We’d like to think Bach and Gounod would, too. There are lots more of our arrangements on our Worbey and Farrel YouTube channel. In the meantime, enjoy Pianist and making music!

THE PRIZE • Choose between two Kawai models – the K15E acoustic piano or the CA99 digital piano – worth over £3,750 • Have your winning score featured in a future issue of Pianist magazine • Concert pianist Chenyin Li will record your composition for the Pianist magazine album • Be interviewed for an exclusive feature inside the magazine

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7• Pianist 116

FIRST PERSON

TAP TO WATCH Bertrand Chamayou plays Ravel

Making waves Bertrand Chamayou wanted to make an album of lullabies years ago, but kept it quiet. Now, he tells Erica Worth, his dream has come true surely the Berceuse composed in 1843-44 by Chopin. According to Chamayou, ‘Chopin’s typical sound is that dreamy sound in the top register of the keyboard. It’s like a crystal sound, with lots of little notes like powder. I love the hypnotic way that, with Chopin, the left hand is not moving at all, even when it feels like it’s improvising. Chopin and Liszt explored this genre so well – but there are so many other composers to discover. When I started my career, I didn’t feel comfortable proposing the idea to my record company. I didn’t think they’d take it seriously!’ Nightmares included After a sensational Saint-Saëns concertos album in 2018 (which had the critics swooning and won him Gramophone Artist of the Year twelve months later), Chamayou felt the time was right. A spot of research confirmed a surprising dearth of lullaby-themed albums on the market: ‘I searched for some on Spotify,’ he explains,

8. Pianist 116

Photo: © Marco Borggreve

R

avel’s childhood and holiday home of St-Jean-deLuz is in my mind’s eye as I pick up the phone to call Bertrand Chamayou. The French pianist has pitched up in the pretty Basque fishing town to take part in a one-off concert with the Labèque sisters as part of the Festival Ravel. As a going concern for over a century, the festival has hired Chamayou to give it a shot in the arm, prior to a full-scale relaunch in summer 2021. It sounds like a dream and I’m keen to hear more, but first we need to say Good Night! I have an advance copy of Chamayou’s latest album, which bears that very name, from Erato/Warner Classics. It’s a collection of lullabies old and new, borrowed and blue – and I find it entrancing. ‘The concept of a lullaby album was actually a very old idea of mine,’ Chamayou tells me. ‘Probably since I was a teenager. I have always loved lullabies.’ The Romantic-era masterpiece among keyboard lullabies is

PRODUCT NEWS ‘but I was surprised to find that there was nothing. So I thought, “I need to do this now!” I made a long list at first, and then narrowed it down to 16 pieces. If you listen to the whole album, there is a real story: dreams, then fears, and then dreams again.’ Chamayou’s selection of music is by no means confined to restful cradle songs. ‘I am an insomniac,’ he confides. ‘I have lots of ideas in my brain when I am trying to sleep. The lullaby’s place is halfway between dream and reality: there is that special moment while you are falling asleep and you experience all kinds of emotions – both positive and negative, with anxiety thrown in too. I think I am not alone in that we are all very equal in our thoughts when night is coming.’ Anxiety certainly seeps out of Helmut Lachenmann’s desolate Wiegenmusik (‘Cradle Music’, written in 1963 for the birth of his first child) which ‘can be understood as both a dream and a nightmare,’ according to the pianist. ‘I wanted more challenging lullabies about nightmares and fear, such as the Lachenmann and Martinů pieces. It makes the album more of a story.’ The eerie clusters of Lachenmann find uneasy rest before leading with a sigh of relief into Brahms’s comforting Wiegenlied, and Martinů’s spellbinding Berceuse follows equally naturally. Among the new and unfamiliar works, I was especially taken with Song for Octave: a commission from Chamayou himself which the US composer Bryce Dessner wrote for his son. Good Night! is also the name of the seventh piece of On an Overgrown Path, Janáček’s cycle of haunting tone-poems. ‘The title was my idea,’ Chamayou laughs. ‘I was having trouble finding a name for the album. I hadn’t even thought of recording the Janáček. Then it dawned on me: what a great title! And it is a magical piece as an opener. Let’s say, it was meant to be!’ In the still of the night Rather unusually – but appropriately – Chamayou recorded the album at night, over the course of three evenings. ‘We found a little chapel near Paris, 15 kilometres from home,’ he recalls. ‘I had wanted to record during the day, but there was lots of building work which made it impossible.’ There is some wonderfully lucid piano sound on the new album: Chamayou explains that he was fortunate to have access to his own Steinway instrument for the sessions. ‘My piano technician, who lives 200 metres from my home, prepared it in a special way. We talked about it together endlessly, for about two months.’ The range of both timbre and repertoire is inspiring, even upon repeated listening, and I am keen to try out some of the pieces myself (you may find one or two in future Scores sections of Pianist). I ask Chamayou if there are any pieces particularly accessible for the amateur pianist. ‘It depends,’ he replies. ‘Some are not that difficult, such as the Janáček, the little Liszt Wiegenlied and Lyapunov’s Berceuse d’un poupée. Even the Mel Bonis [La toute petite s’endort Op 126], the famous Brahms and the Villa Lobos [A prole do bebê No 6, A pobrezinha] are manageable. Others are more difficult, such as the big Liszt Berceuse and the Transcendental Etude by Lyapunov.’ Then of course there’s the Chopin Berceuse, definitely for the advanced player, which Chamayou waxed so lyrically about at the start. Even if you’re not ready to learn it, listen to Chamayou’s tender account – it’s the perfect night-time treat. n Good Night! is released by Erato/Warner Classics on 9 October (0190295242435). See also www.bertrandchamayou.com and www.festivalravel.fr.

New Clavinova series from Yamaha CLP-700 series promises further innovations in digital fidelity A range of new digital instruments from Yamaha features, among other developments, a new action which should further refine the relationship of the player to their piano. Depending on the model, all pianos feature either the GrandTouch or the new GrandTouch-S keyboards. Both claim an outstanding level of authenticity and rich harmony, partly achieved by the different key lengths, counterweights and the pivot point between the white and black keys. In addition, they offer a high degree of expressive control in individually shaping the tone from pianissimo to fortissimo. GrandTouch was the first major innovation in the Clavinova action when the CLP-600 series was launched in spring of 2017; it is based around the mechanical ‘escapement’ characteristic found on acoustic instruments. There are six new models, ranging from the simplest entrylevel to two grand styles: CLP-735, CLP-745, CLP-775, CLP-785, CLP-765GP (pictured) and CLP-795GP. Prices start at just over £2,000. Each piano in the series offers the sounds of the Yamaha CFX and the Bösendorfer Imperial, as well as the Binaural sampling of both concert grand pianos for playing with headphones. Plus, the new CLP-700 series now comes with added fortepiano sound, and its enhancement in design is apparent in that all voices and functions for the models from CLP-775 to CLP-795GP can now be elegantly selected via touch sensors below the LCD screen. Further developments in technology include: Real Grand Expression 2, which claims extra sensitivity for the player in that the tiniest nuances of the keystroke from touching to triggering the tone are converted into an unlimited variety of sounds for a more sensitive touch; Grand Expression Modeling, which promises to translate even the finest sound variations produced by the player as if being played on an acoustic concert grand piano; and Virtual Resonance Modeling, which is designed to recreate the natural resonance of nearly every aspect of an acoustic grand piano. Find further information at www.europe.yamaha.com. A feature on the Clavinova CLP-700 series appears in the next issue.

INTERVIEW

THE UNLIKELY

VIKING Undaunted by the pandemic and the success of his DG albums so far, Víkingur Ólafsson has new music, new audiences and new technology in his sights, as he explains to Peter Quantrill

TAP TO WATCH Víkingur Ólafsson plays Rameau

O

Moving on Back in 2017 (Pianist 94) Ólafsson talked to the Editor about his calm and peaceful childhood, his Juilliard degree and his decision ‘not to go down the competition route’. The rewards, including international management, a DG contract and an open invitation to many of the world’s concert halls, did not come without a price. His debut album of Philip Glass Etudes ‘worked well,’ he told me in March, ‘both in terms of critical reception and sales. So there were strong voices, within DG and outside, asking me to do only that. Whatever you do, they said, it has to be late 20th-century American music.’ He refused. ‘Because I knew that if I did that, I would become that pianist. All the other interesting doors I might have opened would have closed for ever. So I chose Bach. And then there were voices saying, let’s do another Bach! So instead I did the French album. Now I have something completely different in mind.’ The ‘French album’ is a typically novel yet logical combination of Debussy and Rameau. Like Ólafsson’s jewel box of Bach miniatures, it has been given two bites at the classical-market cherry: first a straight release, then an upgraded version with ‘reworks’ of selected pieces. The Bach reworks involve a touch of added reverb here, some bolder studio interventions there, courtesy of big names in the world beyond classical: film composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and fellow Icelanders Hildur Guðnadóttir and Skúli Sverrisson. ‘Pianists tend to become artistic victims of their own success,’ ▲

© Ari Magg (main image and p12); © Cem Gültepe (p11)

ne small but significant side effect of Covid-19 in the UK has been the rediscovery of art music by the mainstream media. Apparently paralysed by the slow creep of cultural anxiety over the last half-century, print and broadcast outlets have steadily shrunk their classical coverage in response to fretful concerns over dread buzzwords: elitism, diversity, accessibility. Is it vain to hope that the pressures of quarantine have reversed the direction of this ever-decreasing vicious circle? Front Row is the daily shop window for the arts on BBC Radio 4, and between March and June the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson spoke and played weekly to an audience far more numerous and less specialist than devotees of the classical-centred Radio 3 (which has also enjoyed a Covid-related uptick of listeners). I can’t have been alone among Pianist readers to switch on the radio every Friday evening in the pleasant anticipation of hearing this amiable young Icelandic pianist tussle not only with some Bach or Debussy or Glass – all carefully chosen to give a nudge to his Deutsche Grammophon recordings, for sure – but also with interviewers who were more comfortable asking about the trials of lockdown than pedalling in Rameau. Yet still, between fielding nervous enquiries of ‘How does it feel?’ and ‘Interesting – will you play for us now?’, Ólafsson confidently explored big ideas with a fluency and carefree intelligence that makes him a natural communicator and educator. Born in 1984, Ólafsson works at the vanguard of a new generation of recording artists in their 30s and 40s. Backed by major labels, with the time and resources to make their own mark, they have learnt from the world of pop as well as harnessing new technologies. Ólafsson makes a new album as a discrete entity: an experience of art to be treasured not as an inevitably deficient simulacrum of the concert hall experience but as a multifaceted object of beauty in its own right through bonus tracks, remixes and the particular freedoms and restrictions of streaming services and premium vinyl.

Víkingur Ólafsson on

Rameau at the piano Rameau had little money until late in life. Only in the last 20 years of his career did he start to mass-manufacture the operas that made his fortune. And yet he didn’t change a thing about the way he lived. He kept working at his harpsichord. He supposedly had a single pair of boots, one or two suits of clothing and he was a generous man. Debussy also didn’t have a comfortable life. He was doing all sorts of other things into his 40s when all he wanted to do was compose. He was a music critic, and he was a very tough one! But he wrote this about a performance of Castor et Pollux: ‘Rameau seems to be our contemporary’. And that became the seed for my album. The music of Rameau really does seem like music of the future, whether speaking of poetic or harmonic content. When you play Rameau’s music on the piano and look at what he originally wrote on the harpsichord, you do have to make some modifications in terms of ornamentation. My goal is to make sure you never experience a trill as an external device, even when there are a thousand trills on the page. It should feel like part of the music, not an alien object. Rameau’s music is much more straightforward than Bach’s, it tells a specific story. He seems to be a man of the people. In the E minor Suite with the dialogue of the birds, I feel we’re in a French village, with people playing folk music, a quarrel, the tranquillity of night in the gavotte. And La Villageoise, the Village Maiden – is her heart getting broken or is she the heart-breaker? Older performances have made her a sad young lady – I don’t think so! She’s much darker than that. She isn’t a victim, she is a mysterious, flirtatious woman. You can’t grasp her, no one can touch her. She is what you imagine when you see the young Martha Argerich stride on to the stage and you ask, who is she, where does she come from?

TAP TO WATCH Víkingur Ólafsson plays Marcello arr. Bach

Víkingur Ólafsson Up clos e

If you could play only one piece in the whole repertoire from now on, what would it be? The Well-Tempered Clavier. One pianist, dead or alive, you’d travel long and far to hear? Liszt. One concert hall you’d love to play in? Carnegie Hall – the main stage! What would be your advice to amateur pianists about how to improve? Play through your ears. If you weren’t a pianist, what would you be? A doctor. What other kind of music do you like to listen to? Lately I’ve been enjoying the mid-90s period of Aphex Twin.

Ólafsson remarks. ‘Debussy said that you should always try to escape your success. What that means for a pianist is that if you do a piece or a recording that is particularly successful, the chances are that you want to repeat that success and to capitalise on it. But when you do that, you lose the sparkle of invention, you lose the sense of discovery. The repeat is the enemy of art.’ Accordingly he has some advice for pianists coming after him: ‘Whatever you do, make sure that if you have success, it doesn’t work against you. This is why I like the Debussy/Rameau album. I like how these two guys escaped the influence of their own times and discovered their own voice. Rameau stirred controversy just like Debussy. There is never a formulaic element in either of their outputs.’ Living in interesting times I’m reminded of Wagner’s fabled advice to his Bayreuth assistants: ‘Kinder! Macht neues!’ (Children, make it new again). Though Ólafsson has Beethoven’s Op 111 Sonata and plenty else in his sights, refining his own take on a repertoire standard is unlikely to satisfy a perennially restless mind. We met in London just as the pandemic was beginning to bite. Japanese-style bows of socially distanced greeting completed, we turned inevitably to the subject at hand, and once past an exclamation of despair (‘The whole music business is going to hell!’), understandable in one who had just received news of half his engagements disappearing overnight, he was bursting with ideas. ‘This kind of uncertainty is very interesting,’ he says. ‘It could be an interesting experiment, to discover how creative we can be. We performers are like monkeys, travelling the world from one week to the next. Maybe it’s going to be wonderful. Maybe it will stay like this for ever. These are interesting times and there is no right decision, but as human beings we adapt so quickly.’ Cameras, for example: if the audience can’t come to him, he must go to them. ‘I remember how nervous one could be, walking on stage with a camera almost on the keyboard. But I’ve stopped noticing it, because it has become the norm. Ten years ago, I would have had the frights. It would be wonderful if every music stand had a micro camera. Then in real time the audience could choose their own perspective, what they want to watch – at home too. You could have cameras inside the piano action, so you could see the whole factory of hammers, the 11,000 parts that make up a piano. It might sound like Big Brother, but I love the idea.’ What Ólafsson most feared in March – the cancellation of Finnish concerts featuring the premiere of Sauli Zinovjev’s new piano concerto, two years in the making – came to pass soon enough. ‘How am I going to fit it in?’ he wonders. ‘Sauli has to wait until he is three years older to hear the piece.’ He remains, however, incurably positive. ‘It’s terribly exciting and terribly discomfiting not to know what’s going to happen. But one thing is for sure – art needs instability, and the best art is not created in the most prosperous times. Perhaps that sounds cynical: of course I love prosperity and peace, for myself and everyone else. I want humankind to do very well. The fact remains, if you look at music history, that the greatest works have been created in tumultuous times.’ The art of projection When he wasn’t popping up on Front Row, Ólafsson used quarantine as a sabbatical to spend more time with his baby son. He also fronted up a TV series devised on the fly with his journalist wife, introducing music to local audiences in bitesize ten-minute chunks. ‘I started to go back to my roots as the indie musician that I 12• Pianist 116

used to be, before management and DG.’ Like most Pianist readers, Ólafsson spent lockdown practising, in the rehearsal studio in his new home. The concept behind the next album is yet to be revealed, but in the meanwhile there is new and old repertoire for his 2020-21 residency at London’s Southbank Centre, including chamber music by the Danish composer Bent Sørensen and the evergreen Piano Concerto by Grieg. I wonder, given his superfine touch as a recording artist: does he learn music in different ways for the studio and the concert hall? ‘The question has the answer!’ he replies. ‘I strongly believe these are two different art forms. When we’re playing for the microphone, successful piano recordings have to be like a conversation, like we’re sitting here, as if I was the microphone listening to you and the other way around. You talk to the microphone, you don’t have to project. So when you play in the studio you should play with extremes. A forte on my recordings isn’t the same as the forte I’d play in the Royal Festival Hall. Not even close. It might even be something like a mezzo piano!’ Whatever the acoustic, great piano playing requires

‘One thing is for sure – art needs instability, and the best art is not created in the most prosperous times’ projection, and in this regard he hugely admires both Gilels and Volodos, two contrasting representatives of a ‘Russian Piano School’. ‘It’s all about consistency in the way you shape your melody line,’ Ólafsson continues. ‘If you sculpt it the way Callas would have sung it, it will project. If your melody line is angular, and you’re not listening to yourself, you won’t get the right colour on the next note. It’s about diplomacy of sound – how you listen to one voice in your playing, and how that voice listens to the others. And then you can’t do the kind of things that Gilels would do, which is to play an extraordinarily firm forte, but from the key, not hitting it from above. He could play like a trumpet, almost a cold kind of melody, with a brassy quality to the sound – but it’s still not a trumpet, it’s a piano!’ Ólafsson counts the Gilels album of Lyric Pieces among his favourite recordings: ‘in terms of sonority and ways of sculpting sound, it sounds modern every single time.’ Across our chats, discussing music from Couperin to Adès, it’s noticeable that modernity is what he seeks and finds in the music he loves from whatever period; the conviction that, whatever its date, great music can and should sound as though it had been composed yesterday. His world view holds no place for sentimentality; nor, according to him, did Grieg’s. ‘If you go to Norway and meet the people, you find there is nothing sentimental about the country or its culture. It’s a very pure and strong kind of beauty that you also find in Icelandic landscape – a cold, cruel beauty, never self-pitying. And I think people fall into the trap of playing Grieg with a kind of cute self-indulgence. There is no place for cuteness in Grieg.’

Up in the air Ever since he played it at the opening of the Harpa hall – ‘the most important concert of my career’ – the A minor Concerto has acquired a talismanic significance, most recently in a unique account which sprang up through necessity, with Ólafsson alone in Harpa, accompanied live but remotely by the Bergen Philharmonic and Edward Gardner, a thousand miles away. ‘I play it all the time – but then my name is Víkingur – the Viking! I find it such a modern piece – there’s a lot of Debussy in it, for example. Whereas Debussy said he couldn’t stand Grieg’s music – but then why did he take elements of it for himself?’ Taking out his phone, he demonstrates via Spotify the unmistakable similarity between the opening gestures of ‘Peace in the Woods’, from the final volume of Lyric Pieces (published 1901), and Debussy’s Violin Sonata (composed in 1917). ‘I find Grieg a seriously good composer, a revolutionary in many ways and more modern than we give him credit for.’ The Zinovjev premiere may have to wait, but Ólafsson is still working with the revolutionaries of our own time. He was the second pianist after Yuja Wang to take on the latest John Adams concerto, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?: ‘I think it’s an absolute masterpiece, a rare instance of a non-pianist writing a successful piano concerto. Under your fingers it feels Stravinskian.’ He is also bewitched by Thomas Adès’s creation myth for piano and orchestra, In Seven Days (presently scheduled for concerts in 2022). ‘If you’re composing the stars, the sun and the moon, it’s… I could listen to this for ever: it fills me with a sense of awe. I’ve just done a playlist for Spotify – “Classical Takeover” – and I put in the last few movements.’ When I met him in March, Ólafsson had been due to head off to the Spotify offices in London for a chat with the boss – but the company had wisely shut down early, and the pianist disavows any impression of himself as a brand ambassador: ‘I use other streaming services too – Apple Music, iDagio, Primephonic…’ We discuss how modern ways of listening to music have influenced the making and recording of it. ‘Headphones are how most people listen these days and so they take primary importance [in mixing an album] – or at least certainly not less important than a fancy set-up. I am doing these recordings for my audience. The old classical audience might say, you have to record the big structures to show that you can grasp them. But I don’t think so. I think the challenge of recording a perfect three-minute piece by Rameau is in some ways greater than a 20-minute first movement of late Beethoven or Tchaikovsky. Lots of people will disagree with me. I just like the shorter forms of music for listening at home and the larger formats for the concert hall.’ As well as the least likely-looking Viking I’ve ever met, he is entirely a musician of our time. n Víkingur Ólafsson’s Reflections project launches on 25 Sept, beginning with a single release of a Hania Rani rework of Debussy. Triad, a 3CD box set comprising three previouslyreleased albums, is released on 20 Nov. See www.sbc.org.uk for details of Víkingur Ólafsson’s Southbank Centre residency. Further information about future projects and recordings can be found at www.vikingurolafsson.com.

13• Pianist 116

HOW TO PLAY BRING OUT YOUR INNER VOICE

THE MELODIC LINE With the right technique, a pianist’s ‘voice’ can be as convincing as a singer’s, says Mark Tanner: that goes for those subtle, hidden melodies as well

P

ianists are often encouraged to think more like singers. There’s a long history of such advice, and by grasping the potential link between our ‘real’ voice and our ‘pianist’s’ voice, our playing should sound more compelling. From a rich literature on cantabile playing, dip into Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger’s wonderfully readable book, Chopin: Pianist and Teacher, which pulls together countless quotes and anecdotes from pianists, composers and critics. Seen often through the eyes of Chopin’s pupils, we realise just how lyrically-conceived good piano playing often is – and indeed how a close affinity with the human voice should ideally inform what we are doing when we tease out a melody, whether this be an upper or an inner line. In an earlier article (issue 100) I focused on the need to bring out melodic lines situated in the tenor (middle) register of the piano, since it is in this warmer region of the instrument (I called it the ‘sweet spot’) that the Late Classical and Romantic composers often attached particular fascination. Here I will be focusing on the broader topic of discovering and learning to play inner lines a lot more compellingly. Think like a singer Done well, we will often associate our piano melodies with their sung equivalent, and so the more we are able to shape lyrical

lines, just as a good singer would instinctively do, the easier it will be to communicate to our listener. Factoring in breathing places – or implied breathing places – is central to how we ‘sell’ a melody from the piano. Doing this will also guide us in matters of tempo: would a singer be able to sing what I’m playing, without running out of breath? And also with shaping: how can I emulate what a singer does with crescendos, diminuendos, accelerandos and ritardandos, to give my playing shape and direction? When pianists do not manage this effectively, their playing will sound static, or syllabic – in

5

TOP TIPS

A beautiful voice

1

Think like a singer. Choose speeds, phrase shapes and pedalling to create inner lines that sound singable, and which avoid the appearance of disconnected melodic notes.

2

Hunt out inner voices. These may languish inconspicuously lower down in a score, or else feature more prominently in the middle stave when three are used.

3

Mark in lines to indicate inner lines that might go unnoticed. Also mark in loops to remind you which hand/finger works best.

4

Be bold with dynamics, especially crescendos and diminuendos, to help bring out inner voices.

5

Practise inner lines in isolation at first, to lift them out of richer textures, then slowly reintroduce harmonies and accompanimental notes. 14• Pianist 116

other words, we’ll hear a series of separate percussive notes, bolted together unconvincingly, rather than a smoothly flowing chain of notes which capture our imagination. Music’s ebb and flow are what keeps us listening; it’s the lifeblood of a musical phrase, and just because we may have many additional notes to play shouldn’t distract us from this primary goal. Inner lines may be less obvious in appearance from a more densely populated score, though they can be just as important, which means we need to think more like a conductor who wants to ensure melodic strands are always heard, no matter how busy the surrounding texture. If it moves A simple guiding principle for bringing out interesting inner lines is to look for those which have extra pitch and/or rhythmic movement. Take Alkan’s Prélude Op 31 No 1 (p51) – a 10-bar gem, conceived for piano or organ: first we need to spot that the main ‘moving part’ of the musical texture occurs in the RH, alternating between the lower and upper ‘voices’. There are various things we can do to help emphasise these notes. One is to ensure we are not placing undue competition on the LH. Balance-wise, the LH therefore needs to play as quietly as possible, but without losing clarity of tone (especially tricky when, as is the case here, the composer instructs us to use the una corda,

which can ‘flatten out’ piano textures). Next, we can practise playing the tune in isolation, preferably using the fingers which will eventually be tasked with playing these notes when the others are reinstated. Thirdly, we can make an inner voice sound more prominent by ‘pulling in’ the relevant finger as it plays each note, thereby making the key travel at a higher velocity than its neighbours: to do this, encourage a small but decisive sliding action of the fingertip towards you across the key top, so that it is moving both in and down simultaneously. This technique poses an extra challenge when the notes in question are not at the tops of chords, as is the case here, though practising the RH on its own, using as much pedal as is needed, should help. Lastly – and this is where the ear is so important

of the Préludes, the complexities of dividing notes between the hands increases, though the idea is to help us spot things such as important inner voices more easily as we begin to coordinate our hands and brain. In Liszt’s transcription of Mendelssohn’s On Wings of Song (p60), the tune is positioned on the middle stave, but is continually switching between the hands in order to permit accompanimental notes both above and below it. The Bridge Pastorale would hence be a good preparatory piece. My strategy in these circumstances is to pencil in loops – downwards ones to indicate notes best taken in the LH, upward ones for the RH. I recommend two things here: 1) don’t necessarily settle on the first solution that occurs to you, and 2) test each fragment up to speed, so that decisions over

Let’s get lyrical

Advice from Mark Tanner on bringing out the melody in three of this month’s Scores Bridge Miniature Pastorale No 2 (p43): For the first 16 bars, play the crotchet staccato chords very { lightly to help focus the listener on { the tune. Through bars 37-52, a { similar effect is doable, though this will be harder to pull off { because the melody and accompaniment are closer together, lower down the keyboard. Between bars 17-36, bring out the inner voices, which wind their way flowingly between the hands. Frank BRIDGE (1879-1941)

the role of melody for a change! Playing tips: Nice to see the LH taking need to produce a rich, sonorous At the start it does just that, so you will the RH plays light and tone with the LH melody line, over which the melody becomes more detached repeated chords. From bar 17 work together to create a more interwoven between both hands as they from bar 53; make sure that tense mood. A recitative-like coda appears you pass from LH to RH. the ascending line sounds seamless when the score. Some half-pedalling/ Pedal tips: See pedalling suggestions on Let your ears be your guide. flutter-pedalling will be needed as well.

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43• Pianist 116

04/09/2020 11:41

Alkan Prélude Op 31 No 1 (p51): The octave Gs, which form a slow-moving ostinato for the { opening four bars, distract us from { the all-important inner voice – you { could omit these octaves at first. Be happy to break an occasional { more challenging stretch, for example the ninths in bars 2, 5 and 6. Pedal certainly eases the process of gluing the whole thing together, but create as much of the legato effect by careful fingering, which will help when it comes to adding the finishing touches of phrasing. Charles-Valentin ALKAN (1813-1888)

Lentement

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TRACK 11

Préludes dans tous les tons majeurs Introduction by Mark Viner: Alkan’s 25 in three volumes by Brandus of et mineurs Op 31 were first published Mme. James Odier, wife of the Paris in 1847 bearing a dedication to of the Sonate de concert Op 47 cellist who was to later become dedicatee may feel tempted to draw an (1857) for cello and piano. While we Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), invidious comparison with the set by a cursory glance at Alkan’s which appeared some eight years earlier,

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51• Pianist 116

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in making the effect work – we should practise pedalling so as to minimise blurring and maximise the connections we are wanting to hear between the notes forming an inner voice. A problem shared Where an inner voice shifts more regularly between the two hands, as is the case in Bridge’s Miniature Pastorale (p43), we’ll need a slightly different strategy. First, we could pencil in a long wavy line to connect the dotted minims which constitute an inner voice, which in this instance can emerge like a cello; for the first 16 bars this alternates between the bass and tenor voices. This will guide us as we practise passing the melodic baton between the hands. I’d recommend omitting all other notes at this stage, then gradually reintroduce them, retaining a firmly prominent line. Three’s a crowd When music is notated over three staves, as Debussy does in Book 2

sharing these notes are futureproofed. Hands separate practice is indispensable, with and without pedal, to help distinguish the dynamic balance between melodic and accompanimental notes. The edition is helpful in this regard, since it prints downward stems to suggest notes best taken in the LH, for example from bar 27. When the spadework is done – locating and pencilling in inner lines, then sorting out how to distribute the notes – we can tackle the real business of connecting them into a meaningful musical experience. Be bold with dynamic contouring – shape upwards towards peaks of phrases, and back down again – so that your listener is never left wondering what they are supposed to be latching onto. Finally, find a speed that will be workable for the entire piece; it’s often a good idea to look further into the score for places where we are required to play octave versions of a tune that was initially a ‘solo’ inner voice, or where the texture becomes more rich and involved. 15• Pianist 116

Mendelssohn arr. Liszt On Wings of Song (p60): You could initially dispense with the bass stave, { thereby allowing you to focus on distributing the treble clef notes in { the top two staves between the { hands. However, be sure the LH’s melody notes are allocated to fingers that will be free when the bass notes are added back in. Another helpful approach is to ghost (i.e. touch, but don’t play) all notes other than the melody, so that you still get the benefit of feeling your hands negotiate all the tricky manoeuvres. Felix MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847) arr. Franz LISZT (1811-1886)

DON’T MISS LUCY PARHAM’S

TRACK 15

LESSON THIS PIECE ON

PAGE 22

ADVANCED

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(‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’) is a The original melody On Wings of Song second from his set of six songs for song by Felix Mendelssohn, and is the – written in 1834. The words are voice and piano – the Op 34 Gesänge Romantic poet Heinrich from a poem written in 1827 by the German that he arranged it for solo Heine. Liszt was so taken by the melody

notes feature stems up and stems piano in 1840. Note: The melody-line are to be taken by the RH and down: Stems up indicate that the notes might seem a tad intimidating, stems down by the LH. Even if the score it in her lesson. Lucy Parham guides you calmly through on page 22. Read Lucy Parham’s step-by-step lesson

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60• Pianist 116

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p60 Mend-FINAL.indd 60

Learn from your experience of playing contrapuntal music, in which multiple voices compete for our attention, so that when we tackle music from the Romantic repertoire we instinctively aim for a clear delineation of any inner voice, regardless of where this happens to be. n More about Mark Tanner can be found at www.marktanner.info.

HOW TO PLAY WAYS TO STAY FOCUSSED

ORGANISING PRACTICE TIME Part 2: ‘Think ten times and play once’ – so said Theodor Leschetizky. In the second instalment of a two-part series, Graham Fitch looks at ways to handle repetition

P

iano practice involves a fair amount of repetition to get our pieces to the stage where we know what we want to do with them musically, and the physical movements involved have become automated (meaning we no longer have to think about them consciously). However, repetition comes at a price. We all know the expression ‘practice makes perfect’, but it turns out only perfect practice makes perfect! If we bear in mind that ‘practice makes permanent’ we can guard against a mañana attitude to practising, where we put off making corrections or improvements; instead of sorting these things out immediately when they arise, we ingrain habits that end up being remarkably difficult to shift later. The danger of repetition is that our practice can so easily become mindless and mechanical – the more we repeat something, the less we respond. This phenomenon is known as habituation, where our brain says ‘been there, done that’ and we stop listening as our mind wanders. Very little can be achieved in this state; the secret is to constantly vary the way we repeat something so we focus on different things each time. There are many ways to do this, as I hope to show you in this article. In Part 1 (issue 115), I stressed the importance of short taskspecific practice blocks where we have a clear intention of what we plan to achieve. By following this up with a moment or two of reflection (preferably jotted down in a practice diary or piano journal) we can really make tangible progress day by day. If we make it a priority to devote our best practice time specifically to correcting or improving those areas of weakness in our pieces (rather than playing through parts we can already do well) we will reach our goal much quicker, provided we know how to practise – a subject rarely taught specifically enough. Let’s explore some ideas for managing repetition in our practice! Plan, play, judge Rather than stabbing at a passage multiple times hoping it’ll get better, spend a moment in self-reflection before you repeat it. What are you hoping to achieve, and by what means? Afterwards ask yourself whether your result matched your intention and if not, in what ways – precisely – did you fall short of your goal? The feedback you get from this gives you a very clear focus when you play the next repetition; you have something tangible to aim for. This sort of practice does take discipline; it’s not easy to stop and reflect. But remember the words of one of our pianistic grandfathers, Theodor Leschetizky, who advised his students to

‘think ten times and play once’. In this way, we learn to selfdiagnose and to become our own best teacher.

The danger of repetition is that our practice can so easily become mindless and mechanical – the more we repeat something, the less we respond Dynamics Part of the enjoyment of playing the piano is undoubtedly the sheer visceral and physical energy involved in creating the amazing range of sounds possible from our instrument. However, practising at forte and fortissimo levels for hours on end is unnecessary and detrimental to our ears and to our body (no matter how good shape we are in pianistically). There is huge value in initially practising passages quietly and slowly with our focus on using the minimum physical effort; we can gradually build up to the full tempo and dynamic level without increasing tension. It goes without saying that we should always be listening to the quality of our sound (a harsh sound is a clear indicator of unnecessary tension). As we practise, we inwardly acknowledge that this section is going to be fortissimo in performance and that it expresses high drama or intense passion, but we most often practise it somewhat lighter and without the full emotional range. Here is what the great master of piano technique Josef Hofmann has to say about this: ‘It is not at all necessary to practise loudly in order to foster the permanence of impressions. Rather, let an inward tension take the place of external force. It will engage, sympathetically, your hearing just as well.’ – Josef Hofmann, Piano Playing with Piano Questions Answered Deliberately changing the tonal balances is an excellent way to cast a fresh ear over the piece. When we bring out the bass line or highlight an inner voice, not only are we focusing our ear on something new, we are also making increased technical demands

16• Pianist 116

on ourselves. In this three-layered texture from Rachmaninov’s Prelude in D Op 23 No 4, we might practise the middle layer (the main melody) f, and the other two layers (the descant and the LH broken harmonies) pp. Then repeat, the next time re-voicing so that the upper layer receives the f dynamic, etc. This process helps us create the subtle blend of dynamics we require in performance. If you are working on a fugue or a piece that is strictly contrapuntal, use this practice strategy regularly and you’ll notice how easy it becomes to voice the lines at will, bringing one into the limelight for a moment while putting the others in the background. Change the tempo 3

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If you are working on a fast or even moderate piece that requires good control of the digits, the occasional bout of slow practice is wonderful for keeping it clean and tidy. Many concert pianists use ultra-slow tempos for maintaining pieces they have already performed many times. This does not have to be done mechanically – we can attend to every nuance, every pedal change, and so on. If it’s a slow piece, practising much faster allows us to see the bigger picture, rather than getting stuck in the surface detail.

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Practising at forte and fortissimo levels for hours on end is unnecessary and detrimental to our ears and to our body Miming Practising hands separately is such a basic thing to do, but seriously useful. I especially recommend playing the LH by itself, from memory if you are going to perform without the score (it’s often the hand we don’t actively listen to when we play). Once the LH is really secure by itself, miming or shadowing the RH (rather than playing it out) will show you what the LH actually sounds like, so often different from what we think. When I practise Variation 26 from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, I work on each hand separately until I have the LH beautifully shaped and the RH precise and even (I use a variety of different approaches for this, see my video demonstration). When I put it back 17• Pianist 116

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together, miming the RH means I can really hear how my LH sounds. This also has the added benefit of making sure I am not overexerting in the fast notes. Variatio 26. a 2 Clav. 18 f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f # f ? # 16

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Tracking The great teacher Rosina Lhévinne asked her students to play last movements or codas before she heard the first movement or the opening. Beginnings of pieces are often better than the endings, because it is tempting to always practise from the start. Divide your piece up into sections like tracks on a CD. Start from the last track, then play from the penultimate track to the end, continuing backwards like this until you reach the beginning. Another way is to play random tracks, or play tracks in a different order (again, excellent to bolster the memory). Practise without pedal The pedal adds so much colour and resonance to our sound, but over reliance on it tends to cover over a multitude of finger sins. I highly recommend practising deliberately without pedal from time to time, aiming for the highest level of tonal control and connectivity with the hands where appropriate. You’ll sound wonderful when your foot gets to join in again.

Play straight We all want to play expressively and put our heart and soul into the music, but there is a real danger of trying too hard; rubato gets exaggerated and tension creeps into the playing. To counter this, we might practise occasionally coolly and objectively, playing in time (though not mechanically or metronomically) with awareness of the dynamics but underdoing f and ff. When we go back to full-blooded performance, it feels like we gave our piece a really good spring clean. Practising a performance Practising a performance is a specific practice tool used when we go into training for an upcoming performance. When we know the music very well, we practise running through our piece or entire programme with no stops whatsoever, come what may. The run-through is followed by some reflection away from the piano, where we make a list of bullet points in our practice journal of those areas that did not hold up (recording some of your run-throughs really helps with this). This list then informs our next practice session, where we practise only those spots. Go through this process daily for a week or so before returning to other types of practice. You’ll probably want at least three stints of playing through plus spot practice before a performance. Conclusion When it comes to practice, remember that quality is far more important than quantity. We need to constantly be working on sound (tonal colour and variety) as well as accuracy and precision, all the time making sure we stay physically free at the piano. Even when a piece is ready, we cannot afford to become complacent. Rather like the gardener who can never rest, we constantly tinker with and chip away at our pieces, further refining them and keeping them fresh. Vary the way you practise as much as possible, switching frequently between RH and LH practice, fast to slow passages, forte to piano. To keep healthy, avoid practising at full stretch any strenuous technique such as octaves and big chords for more than a few minutes at a time before moving on to something else. n For more in-depth information on practising see Graham’s series of lectures, The Practice Tools, on the Online Academy (http://bit.ly/ thepracticetools). Graham has also made a video walkthrough series on Beethoven’s ‘Pathétique’ Sonata (http://bit.ly/pathetiquesonata).

@ GET IN TOUCH

Graham Fitch would like to hear from readers who have piano-playing questions, whether about a cer tain technique or a passage in a piece of music. Please write to the editor at [email protected]. Due to the large number of requests, Graham may not be able to answer every question that is submitted.

18• Pianist 116

THE SCORES Pianist 116 • Read the lessons • Play the scores LESSONS FROM THE EXPERTS

SCORES KEYBOARD CLASS Repeated notes

MELANIE SPANSWICK is a pianist, writer, teacher and composer. As an author, she is published by leading publishing houses, and has written a three-book piano course for those returning to piano playing; Play It Again: PIANO (Schott Music). Melanie teaches the piano at Junior Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Eton College. As a composer, her music is published in the renowned Edition Schott Composer Series. Read Melanie Spanswick’s lesson on page 20

26

MOZART Minuet in C K6

27

REINAGLE Short and Easy Pieces Op 1 No 8

28

ATTWOOD Allegretto From Sonatina No 3

30

CHADWICK The Cricket and the Bumblebee

NILS FRANKE is Dean of Higher Education at the University Centre Colchester, UK, having previously held posts at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) and the University of Reading. He has recorded for Warner and Brilliant Classics. Nils specialises in historical performance pedagogy, with a particular focus on 19th-century pianist-composers. His editions are published by Wiener Urtext and Schott Music International. Read Nils Franke’s lesson on page 21

33

BEACH Gavotte Op 36 No 2

36

ELIGOULACHVILI Prelude No 3

38

CLEMENTI First movement from Sonatina Op 36 No 3

43

BRIDGE Miniature Pastorale No 2 H.127

46

GEORGE & IRA GERSHWIN They Can’t Take That Away From Me

48

SCARLATTI Sonata in F K106

51

ALKAN Prélude Op 31 No 1

52

ALKAN Prélude Op 31 No 8

55

ALKAN En canon à l’8ve

58

FAURÉ Improvisation Op 84 No 5

60

LISZT On Wings of Song S547

LUCY PARHAM is a concert pianist, writer, teacher and broadcaster. She has performed with all the major British orchestras and is a regular presenter and contributor on Radio 3 and 4. Her Composer Portraits series – featuring the lives of Chopin, Debussy, Rachmaninov, Schumann and more – has resulted in hundreds of performances with some of the UK’s finest actors. Lucy is a professor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Read Lucy Parham’s lesson on page 22

CHENYIN LI is a celebrated concert pianist known for her fiery and intelligent performances of a wide variety of repertoire. Having won multiple international competitions, she has established herself as a versatile player who shines in both solo repertoire as well as concerto. Chenyin has performed in many prestigious venues across the UK, Europe and Asia and her extensive discography includes more than 50 albums for Pianist. Listen to Chenyin Li perform on this issue’s CD

Typesetting by Spartan Press Music Publishers Ltd

© Erica Worth (Spanswick); © Sven Arnstein (Parham); Hao LV/Lumira Studio (Li)

24

HOW TO PLAY ABILITY RATING LATE BEGINNER

GEORGE W CHADWICK THE CRICKET AND THE BUMBLEBEE Deft fingerwork and some well-judged hand-crossing will make this whimsical conversation between two insects come to life, says Melanie Spanswick Key C major Tempo Allegro moderato Style Late-Romantic Will improve your: ✓Hand-crossing technique ✓Articulation ✓Grace notes

This light-hearted piece was written by American composer George W Chadwick. [There is more to read about Chadwick above the score, p30.] The suggested tempo marking of crotchet equals 104-118 beats per minute will help to procure a sparkling and bright performance with a hint of playfulness.

pulse, preferably using a quaver or semiquaver setting, and be sure to place every note to the ‘tick’. It’s easy to rush through the RH semiquaver note-patterns (e.g. bars 2 and 10). To avoid rushing, firmly ‘place’ the black key (e.g. the F# in bar 2) with the tip of the finger, with the aim of sounding the note for its full value. This is vital in bars 25 to 28, too.

Let’s begin with the LH. The accompanying chords demand a crisp touch, as indicated by the staccato markings. Try to ‘block out’ chords in each bar in bars 1-16 and 30-45. For example, play one triad for bar 1 (C, E, and G), then follow suit for all subsequent bars. This will give you an overview of the chordal structure and help assimilate note patterns and fingerings. Now to focus on the LH articulation. The bottom note of every chord (on the first beat of the bar) must be held for the entire bar, acting as a pedal note – for example, middle C in bar 1. Try to hold the minim whilst accenting the first quaver beat of each bar with a deeper touch, followed by a short, sharp staccato touch for the remaining three quavers. Ensure the chords are well balanced by depressing notes at precisely the same moment.

The ornaments demand a clear, decisive touch. Acciaccaturas, such as those at bar 1 and bar 5, should be played before the main beat. Try to ensure the second finger (on the F# in bar 1) uses the finger pad, sounding the note quite heavily. The following main note (crotchet G), played by the third finger, should use an even deeper touch – with the fingertip. This is particularly important for those notes marked with accents (see bar 5). The melody notes with staccato markings must also be very detached.

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DON’T MISS MELANIE SPANSWICK’S ON

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the late 18th- and early (The First New England School includes little piece is No 6 from a set of 19th-century composers). This cheeky for Ten Little Friends. character pieces called 10 Little Tunes lesson on page 20. Read Melanie Spanswick’s step-by-step

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Parker, Amy Beach, Arthur Along with John Knowles Paine, Horatio composer George Whitefield Foote, and Edward MacDowell, American of what is called the Second Chadwick was a representative composer of the late 19th century. New England School of American composers

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30• Pianist 116

04/09/2020 11:30

SCORE ON PAGE 30

When practising hands together, work at a slow speed. This will be crucial for bars 5-8, and all similar, where the RH jumps over the LH. A useful method for practising hand-crossing, or any larger jump, can be to extend that jump. For example, in bar 5, keep the LH chords in place, and take the RH down an octave further than written, moving to the F# and G at the bottom of the bass stave. Practise this big movement rapidly and in isolation. Once you are 20• Pianist 116

used to this, return to the jump as written – it should feel much easier to play under your fingers.

LEARNING TIP For fun, try to imagine a possible conversation between the Cricket (RH, bars 1-4), and the Bumblebee (RH, bars 5-8)!

As to the overall structure, the piece is in Ternary form (ABA) and consists of four-bar phrases. The middle section (bars 1729) will require slow, intense, hands-together practice in order to perfect coordination at such unison spots as bars 23 and 24. It can help to ‘lead’ with the LH in these unison passages; that is, play more heavily into the key bed with the LH fingers, so that the RH part can ‘follow’. This will help you to develop even and crisply articulated semiquavers. The sustaining pedal might be effective at the ends of phrases. Take a look at my suggested pedalling on the score. Observe the octave higher marking (8va) from bar 48 to 50, and be sure to jump down an octave for the C at bar 51. The LH is also marked an octave lower at bars 52 and 53; keep the grace notes lighter than the crotchet Cs – those crotchets demand full power! n More information about Melanie Spanswick can be found at www.melaniespanswick.com

HOW TO PLAY ABILITY RATING INTERMEDIATE

SCARLATTI SONATA IN F MAJOR K106 Learning keyboard music of the Baroque period requires lots of decision making, says Nils Franke. We say there’s no time like the present Key F major Tempo Allegro/Andante Style Baroque Will improve your: ✓Non legato ✓Ornamentation ✓Use of dynamics

Playing Baroque keyboard music on the piano can attract strong views. But only because performers have so many choices to make. The following four points should help you decide how, and why, you want to play this sonata in a particular way. Decision 1: Touch. Written for the harpsichord (the strings are plucked) and nowadays played on the piano (the strings are struck), Scarlatti would have heard a crisp, clear sound. Pianists tend to translate this into the use of non legato on the piano. You might adopt the view that the mechanics of playing the piano (e.g. use of arm weight) are different from playing the harpsichord and require a more legato touch. I much prefer the clarity of the non legato touch in this music, but realise that it is ultimately a personal choice. Decision 2: Tempo. There are two different early editions of this sonata which have different tempo indications: one is Allegro, the other Andante. Both can work from a musical perspective, but so can a compromise. A moderate allegro, as chosen by Chenyin Li on the soundtrack, leaves plenty of space for each note to sparkle. Finding the tempo that works for you can be achieved by playing the fastest printed note value (semiquavers) so that each note sounds very clear: bars 5 to 7 will help you to identify this.

DON’T MISS NILS FRANKE’S

LESSON THIS PIECE

TRACK 10

ON

Domenico SCARLATTI (1685-1757)

Ross (the first performer to record Pogorelich, Lucas Debargue and Scott sonata on the soundtrack and, as all 555 sonatas!). Chenyin Li plays the adds extra ornaments here and is customary with Baroque music, she an andante pace (as marked there. With regards to tempo, she takes might prefer a faster tempo. above the score here). Other performers on page 21. Read Nils Franke’s step-by-step lesson

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as well as a composer, and his Scarlatti was a virtuoso keyboard player sonatas, many very demanding to catalogue includes some 555 keyboard 1750s when the Italian-born play. This sonata dates from the early Spain. Today’s concert pianists composer had settled down in Madrid, and present advocates include continue to programme his music; past Gilels, Vladimir Horowitz, Ivo Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Emil

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Decision 3: Ornamentation. Bach rather helpfully left a table of ornaments (and how to play them) in one of his son’s notebooks. Scarlatti did no such thing, so the way in which his music is played today tends to be based on combining what we know about ornamentation in Couperin and Rameau with the advice of CPE Bach. In other words, it’s guesswork, made even more complicated by the fact that early editions are not always consistent about where to play ornaments, or the actual symbols themselves. It is this uncertainty that makes playing Scarlatti so interesting: his music needs to be ‘personalised’ to make it work. The score of K106 contains trill signs [tr] but no mordents. There are occasions when the tr symbol was used as a generic indication for ornamentation, as may well be the case in this piece. The choice is yours: trill or mordent. If you decide on the former, remember that a trill doesn’t necessarily have to be a constant speed throughout. It can start slower, and then accelerate towards the note on the subsequent beat. What all ornaments in this piece have in common, though, is starting on the upper note.

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3 48• Pianist 116

04/09/2020 11:44

SCORE ON PAGE 48

Decision 4: Dynamics. We also need to think about the choice between terraced dynamics (sudden switches between f and p), and using crescendo and decrescendo (gradual changes 21• Pianist 116

in dynamic). Expressivity when playing the harpsichord also involves the emphasising of notes by elongating them slightly, a technique used less on the piano and, at least partially, replaced by the seamless dynamic changes available to pianists. I would therefore recommend the use of crescendo and decrescendo as an expressive tool in ascending and descending scale patterns (e.g. bars 23, 26, 29 and 33-36).

LEARNING TIP Find the right tempo for this piece by establishing a comfortable speed for the scales in semiquavers.

A performance suggestion. The leaps in bars 11-12 and 14-15 lie well under fingers, because the RH only needs to move by up to a ninth. The equivalent bars in the second half of the piece, 36-39, are more complicated: The RH now covers up to a twelfth and the LH has to move by a distance of over two octaves! Try taking the first and third beat LH crotchet notes with the RH (see alternative fingering on the score). The decision to use this simplification – or, let’s say, finger distribution – is probably determined by the tempo. With so many decisions having to be made, you are bound to make the sonata your own.  Find out more about Nils Franke at www.nils-franke.com

HOW TO PLAY ABILITY RATING ADVANCED

MENDELSSOHN ARR. LISZT ON WINGS OF SONG Liszt’s dreamy transcription would surely melt the heart of its creator: Lucy Parham reveals how to master its subtle portrayal of the human voice Key A flat Tempo Andante tranquillo Style Romantic Will improve your: ✓Voicing of melody ✓Phrasing ✓Thumb agility

This glorious piece began life as a Mendelssohn song. Called Auf Flügeln des Gesanges (On Wings of Song), the song is No 2 from the 6 Gesänge Op 34. The text is by Heinrich Heine, the German poet to whom many of the great Romantic composers turned to for inspiration during the 1820s and 30s. Mendelssohn’s song was later transcribed for solo piano by Liszt, which is lucky for us as pianists because it enables us to play it without the addition of a singer!

you want to try to keep the tempo flowing at all times, but it must never feel too much ‘on the move’. Try to avoid a hurried feeling and always aim for direction in the musical line. Think ‘over’ the bar line at all times. The score suggests use of the una corda pedal. This will help to attain the soft, warm tone that you need. However, I do think it’s better to learn a piece without the soft pedal and then add it as you progress to the performance stage.

During his lifetime, Liszt transcribed numerous songs by his contemporaries; most especially those composed by Schubert. The fact that Liszt toured throughout Europe with these transcriptions enabled this repertoire to be appreciated by a far wider audience than would otherwise have been possible.

Liszt asks for the melody to be very expressive (il canto molto espress.). Hence, it goes without saying that you will need to balance the outer parts carefully as the melody must always prevail.

© Sven Arnstein

LESSON PIECE ON THIS

PAGE 22

notes feature stems up and stems piano in 1840. Note: The melody-line are to be taken by the RH and down: Stems up indicate that the notes might seem a tad intimidating, stems down by the LH. Even if the score it in her lesson. Lucy Parham guides you calmly through on page 22. Read Lucy Parham’s step-by-step lesson

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Felix MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847) arr. Franz LISZT (1811-1886)

DON’T MISS LUCY PARHAM’S

TRACK 15

(‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’) is a The original melody On Wings of Song second from his set of six songs for song by Felix Mendelssohn, and is the – written in 1834. The words are voice and piano – the Op 34 Gesänge Romantic poet Heinrich from a poem written in 1827 by the German that he arranged it for solo Heine. Liszt was so taken by the melody

∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏

It is essential that you acquaint yourself with Mendelssohn’s song. Do this before you begin to study the piece. It is also important to understand the text of the poem itself – not just because of the meaning of the song, but also because certain words will fall on crucial notes, which will inform your interpretation. For that reason, the text has been placed inside the score.

The opening two bars are a gentle accompaniment. We are waiting for the singer to enter. Keep your hands close to the keys here, making sure that the Ab major chord feels natural to play. You don’t want any strutting fingers, so envelop your hand around the chords like a glove.

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60• Pianist 116

04/09/2020 11:53

SCORE ON PAGE 60

It is always a good idea to play the melody alone. Do this without any accompanying notes, using the correct hand. Then you can embellish it. You will notice that the melody is divided between the RH and LH, depending on which hand is closer to each melody note (see the stems up/ stems down). Some people with 22• Pianist 116

smaller or larger hands will find it easier to distribute it in a slightly different way.

LEARNING TIP Learn the central part of the piece first. I would suggest that you start at bar 28 and master the score up to bar 46.

From the outset, sink into the Ab recurring bass notes. At bar 9, when the notes change to Bb, aim to alter the colour. This is the first time the tonic has moved in several bars. The second phrase, from bar 7 to bar 10, needs to blossom more than the first phrase. Ease into bar 10, for the next phrase begins at the end of this bar. Try singing the melody to yourself as you play, and you will quickly discover the natural musical shape. Keep playing the semiquavers but sing the melody over the top as you practise. This will also give you a good sense of where the music naturally breathes. Try not to grab the grace note in bar 11 and give it due weight. There is a hairpin crescendo between bars 11 and 12. The high point of this crescendo is the melody note of Db, which corresponds with the word ‘Garten’ (garden). You need to aim towards this word – then tail off into the beginning of bar 13. The mood at this point is generally a little more sombre as we have entered the minor key.

This key change fits perfectly with the corresponding text about the moonlight. Pay particular attention to the rfz in bar 24. This is an expressive accent and not a violent one. Try to lean into it with your full upper arm weight.

Change the mood at the dolce section in bar 52 (with upbeat). The melody forms a question and answer in the RH. Try practising by sharing both RH parts (the question and the answer) between the RH and LH. This means omitting all the semiquavers and just playing the quaver melody.

The bass is always crucial as it provides the harmonic structure over which the melody is woven At bar 28 the theme returns but this time it is stated in octaves. The question here is which voice of the octave to focus on: should it be your thumb or your fifth finger? Personally, I think it is beneficial to experiment with different voicings as you may change your mind when you perform it! Ensure that the bass line here continues to have a rocking feel about it. The bass is always crucial as it provides the harmonic structure over which the melody is woven. Legato is always our goal in this piece, and particularly now, as is marked again in bar 28.

After you have achieved this smoothly, you can return to playing the score as written. Careful voicing is required in the RH in bars 53, 55 and 57. Grip each note of the chord (so that all three parts – or notes – ‘speak’), but pay particular attention to voicing the top with your fourth and fifth fingers.

The RH presents some technical problems at this point. I suggest that you learn it in blocks. This means playing the second and fourth fingers together, followed by the thumb and fifth fingers (octave) together. This will enable your hand to find the right position. When in doubt, follow the RH thumb. It will act as your ‘guide’. Follow the un poco agitato marking at bar 36. Move the tempo on a little; sink into the LH bass notes with your fifth finger. At bar 41, the written-out turn needs careful handling. It should not sound grabbed. That applies especially with the final Db in the LH, as you need space to get down to the crotchet G. From the middle of bar 48 to 50, keep the tension going throughout the crescendo. 23• Pianist 116

In bars 56 to 59 follow the line of the LH fifth finger. The appassionato at bar 60 applies to two full bars (60 and 61). Make sure you observe the LH accents in bars 59 to 62. These are very crucial as they provide a counter melody – with the thumb particularly relevant. The smorzando marking in bar 62 leads you into the final coda. The word ‘Traum’ (dream) is important here, as this is the feeling that you are trying to capture in the last few bars. Gently unwind and make sure every note sounds within each group of semiquavers. Keep your forearm free and transfer the weight from thumb to fifth (or the reverse, in the LH). Take one long pedal from bar 67 to 70 and then lift the pedal slowly and carefully to capture the ppp spell to the end. n Find out what Lucy Parham is up to at www.lucyparham.com.

H AN S - GÜNTER HEUMANN

BEGINNERS KEYBOARD CLASS LESSON 43: REPEATED NOTES On these pages, Pianist covers the most basic stages of learning the piano through a series of lessons by Hans-Günter Heumann. This lesson features a two-page exercise that will help you take control of your repeated-note technique. Notice how the fingerings constantly change; alternating the fingers allows for a more relaxed hand.

Finger changes on the same key When playing the repeated notes, imagine that the tips of your fingers are lightly ‘scratching’ the keys.

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Hans-Günter Heumann

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24• Pianist 116

 

HANS-GÜNTER HEUMANN KEYBOARD CLASS

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Hans-Günter Heumann continues his series for beginners in the next issue. To find out more about Heumann, visit www.schott-music.com

25• Pianist 116 #17 25• Pianist



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

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-1791)

TRACK 1

This well-known minuet comes from Leopold Mozart’s Nannerl Notenbuch (Nannerl’s Music Book), which includes over 60 short pieces written for his daughter Maria Anna (known fondly as ‘Nannerl’). Find a stable tempo.We suggest counting the pulse silently before you begin. The key is C major.

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Observe the occasional staccato marking in the RH. These staccato notes should be graceful and not too short.

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From bar 5 to 7, you need to make a long crescendo in both hands.

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Think in 2-bar phrases (see the phrase markings). Bars 3 and 4 should sound like an ‘answer’ to bars 1 and 2.

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However, some were penned by her brother, Wolfgang Amadeus, including this graceful C major gem. Look closely at the technical tips within the score.

The word ‘cantabile’ means to sing. So aim for a rich, resonant tone for the RH’s melody.

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Tail off towards the end with a slight diminuendo.Try not to slow down.

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26• Pianist 116

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Alexander REINAGLE (1756-1809)

TRACK 2

BEGINNER

Short and Easy Pieces Op 1 No 8

Born in England, Alexander Reinagle emigrated to the United States in 1786. There he enjoyed great success as a performer, impresario and When you play the first eight bars for the first time, the dynamic is forte (loud). For the second time, as suggested, make the dynamic piano (soft).

The repeated notes, and the first note of bar 3, have to be staccato. Keep the notes light and don’t tense up the wrist.

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teacher. This Allegretto comes from his youthful 24 Short and Easy Pieces for Keyboard Op 1. Look at the technical tips within the score.

Make the last three notes legato.

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Keep the Cs down for the duration of the minim, then lift the hands quickly and repeat the first 8 bars.

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Start off quietly at bar 9. Even if not marked on the score, make a gradual crescendo so that when you arrive at bar 13, you have reached forte.

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End resolutely – hands together and staying on the keys till the end of the bar.Then raise the hands at the same time.

This last line of music is an exact repeat of bars 5-8.

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Bars 10 and 12 in the RH are not as simple as they seem: The first two quavers should be staccato and the third and fourth are slurred.The articulation has to be spot-on!

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Thomas ATTWOOD (1765-1838)

TRACK 3

BEGINNER

Allegretto from Sonatina No 3 in F

The melody in the RH should sing sweetly. Make sure to shape the melodic line by thinking in four-bar phrases. Build up a nice crescendo from bar 13 and then, at bar 19, when the RH starts to descend, make a gradual decrescendo until you reach bar 22 (the return of the opening). Tail off gently to a piano dynamic towards the end, and try hardest not to slow down. When practising, even at the slowest of tempos, aim for your best legato. Pedalling is not required.

Throughout his life, English composer Thomas Attwood benefited from the patronage of the royal family, who even sent him to Vienna to study with Mozart. The royal investment was not wasted: Mozart was impressed by him. This is the first movement from his Sonatina No 3. Playing tips: The LH is the accompaniment, so make sure to keep it flowing and to stick to a solid tempo, with a slight emphasis on the first beat. There should be no bumps at all; smoothness is the key to success!

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29• Pianist 116

&

DON’T MISS MELANIE SPANSWICK’S

George W CHADWICK (1854-1931)

ON THIS PIECE

The Cricket and the Bumblebee

LESSON

TRACK 4

PAGE 20

Along with John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, and Edward MacDowell, American composer George Whitefield Chadwick was a representative composer of what is called the Second New England School of American composers of the late 19th century.

(The First New England School includes the late 18th- and early 19th-century composers). This cheeky little piece is No 6 from a set of character pieces called 10 Little Tunes for Ten Little Friends. Read Melanie Spanswick’s step-by-step lesson on page 20.

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Amy BEACH (1867-1944)

TRACK 5

Amy Beach, also known professionally as Mrs. H.H.A. Beach, was born into a prominent Massachusetts family and was a piano prodigy, giving her first public recital age seven. Following her marriage to a physician, she focused on composition, writing art songs, chamber music, concertos and many works for solo piano. This lively Gavotte is the second of five pieces that comprise her 1897 Children’s Album for the piano (the first piece appeared inside issue 84 and the fifth inside issue 110). Playing tips: This piece is in A-B-A form. For the entire A section (bars

h = 88

1-16), there is continual, quick interplay between the hands; make sure you have a crisp and precise touch. Also try to keep the hands as close to the keys as possible, even if it is tempting to allow the fingers to bounce high from the keys when playing staccato (this will only make for possible wrong notes!). The calmer, pastorale-style section B starts at bar 17 and goes all the way through to bar 40. Make a slight ritenuto before returning to the start – then finish with a flourish at bar 8. Pedal tips: We suggest no pedal, but fine for small dabs here and there.

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Raphael ELIGOULACHVILI (b.1970)

TRACK 6

INTERMEDIATE

Prelude No 3

movie soundtracks written when I was still in music school. Composer’s playing tips: I recorded Prelude No 3 on my upright piano and used the una corda (middle) pedal. It should be played softly and calmly as if it was the music of an old Hollywood movie. After it was recorded, I made some alterations and added bass octaves between bars 5 to 9. At bar 11 there’s a small rubato that leads to the modulation in C. Pedal tips: Legato pedalling is required. You can also use the una corda.

This is an enchanting and hypnotic piece. We stumbled across it a few months back and we think readers will love it. Introduction from the composer: Prelude No 3 is part of a forthcoming album called Preludes – Before Play. Throughout the past year, I began revisiting some of my piano compositions written over the past few years. Piecing them together, the image I gleaned was a portrait of childhood, both past and in the process of becoming. This piece was one of my first

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Muzio CLEMENTI (1752-1832)

TRACK 7

Born in Rome, Clementi’s prodigious talents were recognised by a travelling Englishman who brought him to Dorset. There, age 13, he made the first steps of a long career that would see him tour as a keyboard soloist, run a publishing and piano-making firm, and compose many fine solo keyboard works such as this sonatina. So what’s the difference between a sonata and a sonatina anyway? We’ve been asked more than once over the years! In short, a sonatina is literally a small sonata. As a musical term, sonatina has no single strict definition;

it is rather a title applied by the composer to a piece that is in basic sonata form, but is shorter and lighter in character, or technically more elementary, than a typical sonata. Playing tips: There are so many techniques that can be worked on in this spirited movement – such as scales/runs, arpeggios, trills, repeated chords, different articulations, Alberti bass-playing and more. Slow (and hands separate) practice is required, paying special attention to the more active RH. Pedal is not required.

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Frank BRIDGE (1879-1941)

TRACK 8

INTERMEDIATE

Miniature Pastorale No 2 H.127

Playing tips: Nice to see the LH taking the role of melody for a change! At the start it does just that, so you will need to produce a rich, sonorous tone with the LH melody line, over which the RH plays light and detached repeated chords. From bar 17 the melody becomes more interwoven between both hands as they work together to create a more tense mood. A recitative-like coda appears from bar 53; make sure that the ascending line sounds seamless when you pass from LH to RH. Pedal tips: See pedalling suggestions on the score. Some half-pedalling/ flutter-pedalling will be needed as well. Let your ears be your guide.

Brighton-born Frank Bridge achieved success as a composer, conductor and viola player. His early works show influences of the Romantic composers such as Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Franck, but in the period leading up to the First World War he demonstrated an interest in modernist tendencies, most notably in Dance Poem of 1913, which suggests the influence of Stravinsky and Debussy. During the War and immediately afterwards, Bridge wrote a number of pastoral and elegiac pieces that appear to search for spiritual consolation, and this second of three Miniature Pastorales, composed in 1917, portrays this mood.

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. ff

f.

f.

Œ F™ 1

Œ

5 1

17

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&b Œ

{

nf

mf

?b

F™

F™

1

2

5 4

21

n#Ff

&b Œ

{

f

dim.

?b

25

&b

{

F™ 2

?b Œ

nf

ff

5

3

> F™ &b f

nf

bf

f

#f

nf

{

?

5 3

b

° 1

> & b Ff ™

2

1

pp

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bf

#f

nf

2

Œ

1

f

n#Ff

f

#f 2

nFf ™

f

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nF ™

1

1

Œ

1

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5 1

nff

nf

f

f

F™

#nff

nF ™

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f

3

4

5

3

F ΠF F

p

f

F™ 5

f Œ

p

1

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Œ

f

#f

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1

2

ø

f

nf

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33

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nFf ™

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29

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> Ff ™ f

2

nf

f

5

3

> F f f

1

ø

f

#f

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nf

> F f f

sim. 44• Pianist 116

f 1

f

f

f

f

4

4

1

3 1

f nf

2

nf

Π#f

nf

f

nf f

nf

bf

f

#f

f

2

3

1

2

1

5 1

2

ø

1

2

ø

4

ø

poco rit.

nf

Πnf

bf

f

f f

f

#f

nf

#f

f

™™ ™™

a tempo

37

&b F ™ F™

{

bFF ™™

p

?b Œ #F ™

f

Œ F™

f

°

&b

{

Œ #F ™

f

ø

f

f

ø

F™ FF ™™ f

f

f

Œ #F ™

f

f

ff Œ nff F™

ff

Œ bf #F ™ f

f f

ø sim.

bF ™

F ™™ n# FF ™

Œ F™

f

a tempo

F™ #F ™

b nŒF ™

Œ nF ™ ø

rall.

42

?

f

F™ FF ™™

™ bn FF ™

F™ nF ™

F™

p espress.

Œ

f

f

ff

ff bŒF ™ #ff

f

f

Œ n#ff F™

47

&b

{

?

#F ™

F™

Œ bff b F™

f Œ f F™

f Œ f F™

nff

ff

espress.

52

&b

f

{

Œ ?b F™

56

&b

{

?b

RH

f 1

ff

4

pp

ff

LH

5

f 3

f 4

F™

rit.

5

ff

f

f

f °

2

F

nf 2

f

F ™™ F

LH

4

F ™™ F

F™ F™

U F™ F™

F™

FF ™™

U

ppp

∑

f

2

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1

dolcissimo

∑

f 1

f nf

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°

45• Pianist 116

ø

F™

1

George GERSHWIN (1898-1937) Ira GERSHWIN (1896-1983)

TRACK 9

INTERMEDIATE

They Can’t Take That Away From Me The jazzy number They Can’t Take That Away from Me was introduced by Fred Astaire in the 1937 film Shall We Dance and gained huge success. With music by George Gershwin and lyrics by brother Ira, it has been performed by an array of artists including Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Van Morrison and Robbie Williams. This attractive arrangement is penned by pianist, teacher, composer and arranger, John Kember. Playing tips: The interpretation on the Pianist album might sound a little

‘straight’. We suggest allowing for more rhythmic liberty – i.e. for swing-style quavers, which will make for a more syncopated interpretation. (In swing style, the beat is divided into two, but unevenly, reflecting an underlying triplet feel. Downbeats are 2/3 of a beat in length while upbeats are only 1/3 of a beat in length.) Do experiment and play around with the rhythm while you are securing the notes. Pedal tips: Ample pedalling is required.

Medium swing ( ) E¨maj7

{ 5

B¨11

B¨m7

b & b b ‰ f f f f f bfff w FF f f f f f

{

mf

? b ‰ ff ff ff ff ff ff FF bb

9

b & b b ‰ f f f f f n ff ff ™™ fJ mp ?b Ó j f™ bb f B¨11

E¨maj7

{

B¨11

w f™ f™ f™

B¨m7

b & b b ‰ f f f f f bfff FFF f f f f f

13

{

mf

? b ‰ ff ff ff ff ff ff FF bb

j ‰ # f ™ f ™ w f ™ ff ff ™ ff FF f f f n fF f f b FF # ff- ™ nff. f™ J ™ J f nff- ™™ bf. j j f bF F J f™ f f™ f F Fm7

Gm7

G¨dim7

Œ f f f bFF n#ff ™™ nffJ FF E9¨5 E¨9

E¨13¨9

bf # f ™ n f ™ bf J

F F

f

bF F

Fm7

F7©5©9

C7

B¨13

C7¨9 Fm7

f f f f ff f f nf bfff bnfff . ff f f ff. ff f f

j ‰ ™ # f f ™ # ff ™ nff f F f f f f f f b FF fJ F . nF f nff- ™™ bf. j fJ f F bF F

Fm7

Gm7

ff ff ™ J ™

j f f™

G¨dim7

j Œ f f f f bFF n#ff ™™ nf FF E9

A¨maj7

Fm11

E¨9

bf n#ff ™™ bf J

46• Pianist 116

E¨13¨9

F F

f

bF F

Fm11

A¨maj7

Fm7

F7©5©9

B¨13

B¨7 B¨13 E¨6

f f f f ff f f f ff f ff ff f f fj f f f f

They Can’t Take That Away From Me. Music and Lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin © 1936 (renewed) Chappell & Co Inc.Warner/Chappell North America Ltd. GERSHWIN® and GEORGE GERSHWIN® are registered trademarks of Gershwin Enterprises. IRA GERSHWIN™ is a trademark of Gershwin Enterprises. Reproduced by permission of Faber Music Ltd.All Rights Reserved.

b 4 & b b 4 ‰ f f f f f ff f f f f f f J mp j ? b 44 ‰ ff ff ff ff f f bb f B¨11

Em7¨5 A7¨9©5 j Am7 j D7¨9 Gm7j jAm7¨5 D7¨5 Gm7 j f f f f f nf f f f Œ f ™#ff f f f ff #fff f f f F f f nf f f ‰ fJ f # ff Œ Œ Œ

b &b b F ™ FF

17

Am7¨5 D7

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mf

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f f nf

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f

f

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b &b b

21

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b & b b ‰ f f f f f ff w f f f f f f ff ™™ J mf j ? bb ‰ ff ff ff ff f f b f f™

25

B¨11

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{

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b & b b fff f f f f f bnfff w FF f f f f f

29

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mp

? bb ff ff ff ff ff ff ff FF b b & b b Œ FF ™ bF ™ ?b Œ bb F- ™

33

{

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Œ ff ff ff f n#ff ™™ nfJ ff f f f E9©5

E¨9

bf n#ff ™™ bf J

E¨7

E¨9

E¨7

f bf f f f f f f f

rall.

F7¨5sus

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f

C7

ff f nff ff bf ™ bf ™

dim.

f F f F J

f

nf nff

F11

F13

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w ‰ ff Œ J f . j ‰ f Œ f.

ff ™™ n ff - .J j f™ f f- ™ f.

j ‰ ™ # f f # ff ™™ nff f F f f f f f f fJ F F nF bF f nff ™™ bf j f f F bF F J

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f f™ fJ f ™

f

B7¨5

B¨13

E¨

bFF

FF

F F

F nF 47• Pianist 116

bF bF

F

Fm11

A¨maj7

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B¨13 E¨6

f f f ff f f ff ff ff f f. ff ff f f f f. U bF b FF

U w w w w

B¨7¨9¨13

E¨maj9

mp

U w w

U F F

DON’T MISS NILS FRANKE’S

TRACK 10

LESSON

Domenico SCARLATTI (1685-1757)

PAGE 21

Sonata in F K106

ON THIS PIECE

Scarlatti was a virtuoso keyboard player as well as a composer, and his catalogue includes some 555 keyboard sonatas, many very demanding to play. This sonata dates from the early 1750s when the Italian-born composer had settled down in Madrid, Spain. Today’s concert pianists continue to programme his music; past and present advocates include Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Emil Gilels, Vladimir Horowitz, Ivo

Andante

3 2

5

&b C ‰

{

4

1

3

F

f

f

3 2

5

3

?

f f

f

2

3

1

ff

F

f

f

4

Ÿ f f #f f ‰ nf f f f #f nf ‰ f f f nf f f f b ‰ f f n f ™ f f f f f & fff ff f ff 1

1

1

{

?

8

Ÿ ff ff f f f f f™ 1

3

&b C f

4

Pogorelich, Lucas Debargue and Scott Ross (the first performer to record all 555 sonatas!). Chenyin Li plays the sonata on the soundtrack and, as is customary with Baroque music, she adds extra ornaments here and there. With regards to tempo, she takes an andante pace (as marked above the score here). Other performers might prefer a faster tempo. Read Nils Franke’s step-by-step lesson on page 21.

f f f f f f f f fŸ ™

f f f f fŸ ™ f

INTERMEDIATE

f

f f

f

b

ff

F

f

ff

F

f

1 3

1

1

1

F

f

& nf f

f

1 3

f f f f Ÿf ™ f f f f f f f f f f f ffffffff f f f f f f f f n f n f b f f & f 3

3

{

&b f f

12

&b f

{

?

b

ff nff

ff

f

f

f

f

f f

f&

f f

f f

3

3

5

3

f f

f #f

3

ff

f

3

1

3

nff

1

1

2

nf f f f f f f ? f f f f fff 3

3

3 48• Pianist 116

4

1

f ?f

#ff

f f f f f f nf f f f f n f f fff 1

2

f

f

f

f f

nf

f

f

f

f f

f

f f f f f f FŸ f f f f f f f f f f f f

Ÿ K r &b f f f f f f f j f ™ f

3231

16

1

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2

2

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f

f

4

1

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4

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1

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ffff fff ٠f f f f f nf f &b ffffF f f ff f f ? f f Πf f b f

19

5

3

2

1

Œ

f

f

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f

f Ÿb J bf ™

f bf f f f f b f b f ™ f &b ™ ‰

f™

& b ™™ bf

ff bff

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Œ

2

Œ

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f f b f f f bf f b f b f f &b

26

1

1

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Œ

& b bf

bff

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f

2 3

nf nf f bf bf f n f f b f bf 1

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1

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32

bf

bf

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f f b f bf f Ÿ bF bf f bf

42

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2

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f

5

ff 3 5

1 4 49• Pianist 116

ff ff

ffff 5

42

3

bff nff bff f f 2 3

f

f

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&™

1

42

nff bff

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U

4

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f f

Œ

b f f f f bf Ÿ bF f f f

42

1

1

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31

1 3

2

23

&b

2 1

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3

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29

3 2

5

3

f f

ff 3 5

f bFŸ

42

ff ff

#f f f nf f f f f f bf f f f nf f f ™ n f ffff ™ ff fffffff ™ f f f &b 3 4

33

4

{

ff ff

&b f 2 1 1

36

{

&b f

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f

f

f

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1

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f f f f f f f fŸ™ J &b

45

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3

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& b ff

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f

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FF F

3

f

f f

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5

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50• Pianist 116

1

Œ

f

f f

f 4

fŸ f f

f fŸnf f f ™ F

3 4

&

f f f f f f Ÿf ™

٠f ? f f f F f f fff ffff f &b f f f f f ff f ? f f Πf f b f 3

f

32

48

5

f

bf bF Ÿ f nf f nf ™

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f

f

f

ff f

Ÿ f™ f f f ffff

f

f

f

4

1

f

f

b

2

f f

f

2 1

4

32

3

3

1

2 3 1

1

ff ff f

f

3 1

41

3

4

2 1

ff

f

f

41

1

ff ff

f

f Ÿ f™ f f f f ffff

f

&b f

3

3

bFF F

F F

F n FF

Ÿ f f f f f f f f F 1

f f

f

f

5

3

3 2

2 1

f

1 3

32

2

Œ

1

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Œ

ffff fff f fff U w

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U w

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f

f

f

Charles-Valentin ALKAN (1813-1888)

TRACK 11

INTERMEDIATE

Prélude Op 31 No 1, Lentement

Introduction by Mark Viner: Alkan’s 25 Préludes dans tous les tons majeurs et mineurs Op 31 were first published in three volumes by Brandus of Paris in 1847 bearing a dedication to Mme. James Odier, wife of the cellist who was to later become dedicatee of the Sonate de concert Op 47 (1857) for cello and piano. While we may feel tempted to draw an invidious comparison with the set by Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), which appeared some eight years earlier, a cursory glance at Alkan’s

example reveals the two composers’ intentions were vastly different. It would also be fair to argue that, like Chopin, Alkan cultivated the form of the prelude into a more elevated art form which is justified in its own right, rather than a quasi-improvised prefix rattled off to flex the muscles before launching into a more substantial programmed work. Turn to Mark Viner’s article on page 72 for playing tips on Prélude Op 31 No 1.

Lentement 3

f c & ff

f f ff ff™ ™ ff ff ff ff f f ™ f f 2

1

{

3

ff ff ff ff ™™ f f f f™

{

ff ? f

6

Les deux Ped.

2

2

2

3

4

3

ff f

{

ff ff f ff ff™ ™ f ff ™ ™ f f f ff f f ™ ff f ™ ™ f 4

3

ff ff ff ff ™™ ff ff f f f f™ f f

3

2

2

3

3

3

2

f ff ff ff ™™ ff f f

ff f

ff ff ff ff ™™ ff tenu. f f f f ™ f fff

2

p

ff

2

2

3

5 4

ff ff

4

ff f

#f ? #ff

ff # f f #ff

p

{

2

2

ff f

ff f

ff f

2

ff ™™ f™

3

f

f f f f™ f f f f f ™ ff f 5 4 5

4 5

4 5

3

5

ff ff ff ff ™™ ff ff f f f f™ f f

™™ ™™#fff

4

3

n fff

51• Pianist 116

ff f

f f ff f ™f ™ f f ff ff f f ™ ff ff

ff

ff ff ff #ff ™™

4

3

ff ff ff #ff ™™ ff ff

f f ff #ff ™™ nff ff #ff #ff f # f ™ f f 2

f f ff ff

2

f & ff 1

2

4

f™ ff ™™

ff ff ff f f f

f #f f f f ™ f tenu. f f f f f f™ f f & f #f f f f ™ f f f f #ff #ff ff ff™ ™ ff ff ? #fff

5

3

f f ff ff

4

f

5

3

1

9

ff ff ff f ™f ™ ff ff f f f f™ f f

fff

3

5

3

f f f f ff ™ f ff & ff ff ff ff f™ ™ f f 1

4

3

2

p et très soutenu toujours

ff ?c f

3

2

3

2

2

ff ff ff f f f 2

3

f ff

2

ff n ff f f

5

4

5

2

4

ff ff

fff™ ™™ fff fff 3

ff ™™

2

3

ff ff

™™ ™™

Charles-Valentin ALKAN (1813-1888) Prélude Op 31 No 8 La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer: Lentement

TRACK 12

that moves alternately up a fourth and down a third. La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer (The song of the mad woman on the shore) has a completely different feel, conveying deep tones of the sea itself combined with increasing tension from the mad woman’s ‘voice’. For playing tips on this piece, read Mark Viner’s article on Alkan on page 72.

Alkan’s 25 Préludes dans tous les tons majeurs et mineurs were first published in 1847, and were designed to be played on the piano or organ. The préludes go through all 24 keys, returning to a final Prière (Prayer) in the original key of C major. The 25 Préludes comprise three suites (Nos 1-9, 10-17 and 18-25). The first set starts out calmly with No 1, printed on the previous page, and proceeds in a sequence of keys

Lentement

b 6 & b bbbbb 8

{

? bb b b 68 bbb f ff p f °

5

™™ ‰ ‰ f f ™ J

∑

j fff f

‰ ‰ f f™ J

‰ Œ™

p

j ™™ ™ fff FF ™ n FF ™™ f

fff f

f

4

2

soutenu

INTERMEDIATE

j fff f

fff f

j fff f

fff f

F™ n FFF ™™™

bb f & b b bbb

f f nf nf f f f f f f f f f f f f nf nf f J

? bb b b bbb f ff f

j fff f

{

tristement 3

5

3

2

1

4

2

1

2

2

1

5

3

4

3

1

3

4

2

f f f f f 3

4

2

5

3

2

1

legato

Pedale sempre

j fff f

fff f

j ff ff

f n fff

j fff f

fff f

j ff ff

f n fff

j fff f

fff f

très soutenu

8

fff fffff ff f b J f & b bbbbb 2

4

2

1

2

4

1

1

3

f f f nf nf nf f f nf f f f f f f

3

2

1

{

? bb b b bbb f n fff b & b bbbbb

11

{

j ff ff

j ff ff

f n fff

j fff f

fff f

j fff f

fff f

j fff f

fff f

f f f f f f bf f f f f f f f f nf F ™

f f f

? bb b b bbb f n fff

j fff f

fff f 5

3

j ff ff

fff f

3

4

2

j fff f

1

2

f n fff

2

1

j ff ff

52• Pianist 116

2

1

fff f

5

1

2

3

j ff ff

1

2

fff f

™™ j fff f

fff f

j ™™ fff f

b & b bbbbb ‰

14

‰

{

f™

f J

f

? bb b b b b b F™ n FFF ™™™

fff f

‰

Ϊ

j fff f

fff f

‰ j fff f

‰

f™

f J

FF ™™ n FF ™™

nf nf nf f f f f f f f 17 f f n f n f f f nf nf nf f ff ff f f f b b b &b b b b J ‰ J un peu plus de son, et en animant peu à peu 5

3

3

1

1

{

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j ff ff

1

2

j ff ff

ff ff

2

5

4

3

3

2

1

2

j fff fff f f

fff f

2

1

4

4

3

1

4

3

3

2

1

j ff ff

j fff n fff f f

j ff ff

ff ff

nf f f 20 n f f f f f nf nf f f f f f n f f nf nf f f f n f f f f f f nf nf b & b bbbbb 5

3

1

3

{

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j fff f

5

3

2

2

1

j ff ff

n fff f

2

1

2

fff f

3

2

3

1

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5

3

j ff ff

n fff f

b & b bbbbb

{

2

{

3

3

j fff f

2

3

5

4

1

2

4

3

2

1

1

cresc.

j fff f

fff f

fff f

j fff f

j fff f

n fff f

j fff f

fff f

n fff f

j fff f

nf f f nf nf f f f f f nf f f nf nf f f f f f nf f f f f f f f f f f f f f f f 3

b & b bbbbb

1

2

cresc.

? bb b b bbb f n ff f

26

j fff f

f f f nf nf f f f f f nf f nf f f f f f nf nf f nf f f f f f nf n f f 5

23

j fff fff f f

fff f

5

2

1

1

3

4

avec emportement

5

2

1

1

3

2

1

2

1

en augmentant toujours

? bb b b bbb f n fff

j fff f

ff ff

1

en dim. et en

j fff ff f n ff

j f b ff f

ff ff

j ff ff ff n ff

j ff ff

sempre Ped. 53• Pianist 116

ff ff

j ff ff

bb & b b bbb

29

{

en s ’éteignant

f f f f f f f f 4

f f f f f f

4

3

bb & b b bbb

{

f pp

? bbb bbbb ff ff bb & b b bbb

35

FF ™™ FF ™™

j ff ff

f f f

? bbb bbbb f n fff

j ff ff

bb & b b bbb Œ ™

{

bb f & b b bbb

42

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j ff ff ff n ff

ff ff

poco rinf.

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ff ff

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ff ff

Ϊ j ff ff ff n ff

ff ff

long repos.

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f f f nf nf nf f f nf f f ‰ ‰ J Œ™ j ff ff

fff ff fff

38

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j ff ff

ff ff

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f f f f f

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? bbb bbbb ™ F n FFF ™™™

32

3

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ff ff

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fff f

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ff ff

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j ff ff

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f fff ff f

j ff FF ™™ ff n FF ™™ 54• Pianist 116

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ff ff

‰ Œ™ j fff ff fJ

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j ff ff

‰ ‰ f f™ J

∑

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ff ff

ff ff

j ff ff

pp

FF ™™ n FF ™™

U f ‰ ‰ J f™

j U fff FFF ™™™ ff FF ™™ fJ F ™ u

ppp

*

Charles-Valentin ALKAN (1813-1888)

TRACK 13

INTERMEDIATE

En canon à l’8ve

major, A major, F sharp minor and G minor), even ending with a barcarolle. Mendelssohn’s ‘songs’ were composed between 1830 and 1845; Alkan’s between 1857 and the early 1870s. Pianist Mark Viner has added some detailed fingerings onto the score (note that those fingerings in italic are by Alkan himself ). For playing tips, read Mark Viner’s article on page 72.

This lyrical and rather sentimental piece by Alkan is the third of his six Recueil de Chants (Collection of Songs) Op 65. Alkan wrote five volumes of Chants: Opp 38 (two books), 65, 67 and 70. He took as his inspiration and model Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, not merely sharing their harmonic language and length, but following the key sequence of Mendelssohn’s first book, Op 19 (E major, A minor, A

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56• Pianist 116

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Œ™ 57• Pianist 116

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Gabriel FAURÉ (1845-1924)

INTERMEDIATE/ ADVANCED

Improvisation Op 84 No 5

TRACK 14

WATCH CHENYIN LI PLAY THIS AT WWW.PIANISTMAGAZINE.COM This attractive piece is the fifth of Fauré’s 8 Pièces brèves Op 84. Ricardo Viñes gave the set its first performance in 1903. Playing tips: This is the

perfect piece for practising arpeggios. Try to keep legato at all times and keep fingers close to the keys. Ample pedalling is required – ditto rubato.

Andante moderato

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DON’T MISS LUCY PARHAM’S

LESSON

TRACK 15

ON THIS PIECE

PAGE 22

Felix MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847) arr. Franz LISZT (1811-1886)

ADVANCED

On Wings of Song S547 piano in 1840. Note: The melody-line notes feature stems up and stems down: Stems up indicate that the notes are to be taken by the RH and stems down by the LH. Even if the score might seem a tad intimidating, Lucy Parham guides you calmly through it in her lesson. Read Lucy Parham’s step-by-step lesson on page 22.

The original melody On Wings of Song (‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’) is a song by Felix Mendelssohn, and is the second from his set of six songs for voice and piano – the Op 34 Gesänge – written in 1834. The words are from a poem written in 1827 by the German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine. Liszt was so taken by the melody that he arranged it for solo

Andante tranquillo

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61• Pianist 116

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F O R T H E T E AC H E R

PIANO TEACHER HELP DESK

Lessons from lockdown These recent months of turbulence and change have taught both teacher and pupil a lot, says Kathryn Page. Let’s not throw it all away

© Erica Worth

‘M

oving forward.’ Seldom will two words bring greater joy to piano teachers as they look forward, at long last, to their first face-to-face lessons with pupils. However, must we relish the possibility of shunning Zoom, Facetime and Skype for good as we return to our happy lives as piano teachers in the real world? Let us not be too negative about the past six months. True, it has been hard and tiring. At times, when the internet has been dodgy or when it has been difficult to get hold of copies of pieces, it has been frustrating and exasperating. But lockdown has made many of us stronger, more resilient, organised, lateral-minded and creative. In the major crisis that we have all been through it has been necessary for many of us to learn new administrative and IT skills. Let’s not throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater: there are ways in which we can productively carry on with our new lockdown pedagogical approaches in tandem with the more conventional pianoteaching setting. Firstly, let us not forget how to revert to online teaching for the occasional lesson. If a pupil cannot come to a lesson because parental transport is suddenly not available, then it is far better for an online lesson to be scheduled than for a week to be marked as absent. Similarly, if the roads become blocked with snow at winter, or if you happen to be unable to teach because you have a potentially infectious virus, online lessons

Kathryn Page has appeared in concert and on television as a soloist and in chamber music. She is a teacher, adjudicator and administrator for Chetham’s International Summer School and Festival for Pianists, as well as the Manchester International Concerto Competition for young pianists. She lives in Cheshire and has five children.

could once again prove to be a great saviour. Living in a digital world

Even when you start seeing your pupils every week, do not give up on all the new techniques of scanning, recording and administrative note-taking that you may have had to recently deploy. Perhaps we have developed new habits of sending YouTube clips and links to books and articles before and after lessons, or perhaps we have written a quick email to parents summarising what happened in the previous lesson. Electronic contact is perhaps more efficient than oldfashioned exercise books; haven’t we all felt rather crestfallen when a pupil turns up for a lesson confessing to losing their piano lesson note book? How sad it is to discover that the record of work for six months or more has been permanently erased. Electronic contact ensures that no one can complain about illegible words or untidy handwriting, and it means that we as teachers can have instant access to all of the information in a pupil’s individual lesson ‘book’. If we have organised class concerts online over lockdown, we may find that it is more convenient for pupils’ parents to have these 67• Pianist 116

continued online. In addition to concerts, there are all kinds of fantastic group activities that you can organise for your pupils online, including scales parties, sight-reading challenges, and aural and theory quizzes. Last, and certainly not least, we should encourage our pupils to retain all of the enterprising spirit that many of them have shown as they continue to make progress as pianists and musicians. Many have shown independence, initiative, and organisational skills that have been deeply impressive. I have found that most of my one-to-one pupils have increased their practice time each day. They should be encouraged not only to continue extending their practice session, but also to continue sending in recordings for appraisal, and to always do everything they can on their own before coming to lessons for solutions. Spoon-feeding on a regular basis never really teaches pupils how to stand on their own feet as musicians. Lockdown has made many of our beloved pupils more independent and hardworking than ever before. In the post Covid-19 world, we as teachers must ensure that we continue to do everything possible to allow our pupils to acquire as much self-direction as possible. n

E D U C AT I O N

T A H T E S O H T Warwick Thompson looks at some of the great piano pedagogues of history, and speaks to Stephen Hough and Leon McCawley about their own inspirational teachers

from top: Carl Czerny, Theodor Leschetizky, Heinrich Neuhaus

‘N

o one ever teaches well who wants to teach,’ said Plato. He was utterly wrong, of course (as he was in so many other cases: the cranky old sourpuss wanted to do away with poets and artists altogether, if you recall). If you look at some of the most inspirational and successful piano pedagogues of all time – as I will be doing in the

pushed, is the pupil who will never amount to anything. Is it the ability to show the best path, and push the neophyte away from the wrong one? Again, no: the forbidden door is always the most exciting. Is it someone who screams and terrorises their students into brilliance? There have been several who’ve tried this (and I’ll be naming a certain someone later) but it hardly seems an empathetic or humane way to go about things.

Good teaching is a mystery of talent and temperament between two people course of this article, and hearing from some of their students – you’ll often find that their passion for teaching has been well documented. But the mere desire to teach isn’t enough to make a truly great teacher. There has to be something else. Is it the ability to take an average talent, and mould it into a dazzling one? Probably not: the legendary Nadia Boulanger said that the pupil who has to be continually 68• Pianist 116

If one could extract a single unfailing rule about great teaching, and could market it to the aspiring Boulangers of the next generation, one would be a millionaire. But there is no one-size-fits-all guide. There have to be as many ways to teach as there are teachers and students – and if there is a single truism to be said on the subject, it must surely be that good teaching is a mystery of talent and temperament

© Africa Studio/Adobestock; Sim Canetty-Clarke (Hough)

Great teachers,

between two people. Hardly helpful, I know, if you’re looking for a Madame Sousatzka for your dear little tot. Pedigree pianists Ultimately, I suppose, the mark of a good teacher must be found in the improvement – or in rarer but more interesting cases, the subsequent success – of the student. And here we can begin to point the finger at some of the greats. Perhaps the earliest superstar teacher is Carl Czerny (1791-1857), who studied with Beethoven solidly from the age of ten to 13, and sporadically thereafter. Czerny wrote hundreds of studies for all levels of pianism which are still in use (I frequently contort my flailing fingers through The Art of Finger Dexterity Op 740, and always enjoy it, despite the result) but he also taught many pianists in person. And if we are to judge the teacher by the pupil, then we can say with some security, that with Liszt as his star protégé, Czerny was a success. Another of Czerny’s pupils was Theodor Leschetizky (1830-1915) who became a teacher in turn, and it is principally through him that the idea of ‘pedigree’ has become established: that is, the idea that contemporary pianists can trace their pedagogic ancestry through their own teacher, and then their teacher’s teacher, to (for example) Leschetizky, and ultimately to Beethoven. Leschetizky’s pupils include Paderewski, Horszowski, and Schnabel. One of Schnabel’s pupils was Leon Fleisher (a celebrated teacher at the Peabody Institute, who died aged 92 in August), and Fleisher’s pupils include Jonathan Biss, Hélène

TAP TO WATCH Watch the Rosina Lhévinne documentary

‘Gordon Green once told one of his students to go home and forget everything he’d taught her: and there’s such wisdom in that’ Stephen Hough

More of the best: Rosina Lhévinne with Van Cliburn, Nadia Boulanger, Artur Schnabel

Grimaud, and Yefim Bronfman. Does this then mean that Biss, Bronfman and Grimaud are somehow ghostly avatars of Beethoven himself? Or that we should be able to hear a Ludwigian DNA of phrasing, or rubato in their playing? ‘No,’ answers the British pianist and polymath Stephen Hough. ‘This whole idea of pedigree is meaningless. Every great pianist sounds different, and every one of

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them is an original. They will take something from a teacher, but then have to make their own way – otherwise why would we go and hear them? The wonderful Gordon Green, who was my own teacher at the Royal Northern College of Music [from age ten to 17], thought his job was to make himself dispensable, not to create lots of little Gordon Greens. He once told one of his students to go home and forget everything he’d taught her: and there’s such wisdom in that. All of Gordon’s students sounded different, and that’s what shows the mark of a truly great teacher.’ To be fair, Leon Fleisher also strongly resisted the idea of pedigree, and refused merely to create replicant Fleishbots in his lessons. He also had a colourful, non-Beethovian turn of phrase in the classroom. ‘Play it like a Bavarian milkmaid, not like Britney

Spears. Your fingers shouldn’t be hammers, they should be like dolphin flippers,’ he once advised a student. It’s hard to imagine anything less avatar-like. Legends of yesteryear Before we return to Hough and hear from Leon McCawley, perhaps we should name-check some of the other great teachers of history. The great Moscow-based pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus (1888-1964) imparted his wisdom to Emil Gilels, Sviatoslav Richter and Radu Lupu

(1880-1976) and Van Cliburn at Juilliard. An excellent documentary called The Legacy of Rosina Lhévinne on YouTube gives a clue as to what enabled her to help Cliburn win the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, and has delightful contributions from him, and from her other students John Browning, James Levine and Hiroko Nakamura too. The documentary also contains a wonderful moment when she’s helping Nakamura with the Tchaikovsky Concerto. ‘My husband played this piece for

The mark of a good teacher must be found in the improvement – or in rarer but more interesting cases, the subsequent success – of the student among others, and so must be counted as one of the star-teachers of the ages. Closer to home, we find Tobias Matthay (1858-1945) of the Royal Academy of Music, whose distinguished alumni include Myra Hess, Moura Lympany, and Eileen Joyce. Another London-based teacher was Peter Feuchtwanger (1930-2016) – sometimes called the ‘Zen master of piano playing’ for his insistence on breathing and posture – who helped prepare Martha Argerich for her 1965 win at the Chopin Competition. He also aided Shura Cherkassky to overcome his performance anxieties, and was a teacher of Pianist magazine’s very own Graham Fitch. One of the most renowned teacher-student pairings of the 20th century was undoubtedly that of the charismatic Rosina Lhévinne

Tchaikovsky himself,’ she says without batting an eyelid. No list could be complete without a mention of Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), who seems to have given a nudge not just to pianists, but to just about every significant musician of the 20th century. Daniel Barenboim, Dinu Lipatti, and harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick are some of the keyboard players she helped over the years, but she also encouraged musicians as diverse as Aaron Copland, Quincy Jones, and Burt Bacharach. There’s a wonderful hour-long documentary about Boulanger online called Mademoiselle with a delicious clip of Leonard Bernstein explaining (in sinuous French) how she instantly improved a composition of his upon a first hearing. 70• Pianist 116

Impressive line-up: Gordon Green, Adele Marcus, Eleanor Sokoloff, Leon Fleisher

Trust and tears And now back to the present. In his book of essays and autobiographical sketches Rough Ideas, Stephen Hough writes very touchingly about his teacher Gordon Green. When we speak on the phone, I ask if he could expand a little bit more about what made him such a good teacher. ‘I think it was that he saw everything in the long term,’ he says. ‘Some teachers today simply groom their talented students into being competition winners. They might sound good, but there are no deep musical roots in their playing. Gordon would always say, it’s not how you play now that bothers me, it’s how you’re going to play in ten years. And he wanted his students to be reckless, and take risks, so that you realised yourself when things were going wrong. You learned by experience.’ Were there any drawbacks to this approach? ‘When I was with Gordon, it was a complicated time in my life. I did almost no practice, didn’t go to school, I only listened to rock music, and watched soap operas six hours a day. I hardly ever read a book. Somehow Gordon trusted me a bit too much, and hoped I would sort it all out for myself. When he died, I went to Derrick Wyndham, who was a very different figure, less exuberant than Gordon, repressed even, and more analytical. And he said, if you play like that, there’s no chance you’ll ever be able to do a BBC broadcast. I was too inaccurate, too unpolished: there were certain technical things that Gordon had never addressed. What Derrick said was a shock for me, and a bit of a lightbulb moment. It was tough love.’ Hough’s first significant teacher as a child was Heather Slade-Lipkin

© David Swanson (Sokoloff); © Chris Hartlove (Fleisher); © Anna Paik (McCawley)

E D U C AT I O N

(1947-2017), who also gave Leon McCawley his initial grounding in keyboard technique. I initially wanted to ask McCawley about the extraordinary and larger-than-life figure of Eleanor Sokoloff, with whom he studied at the Curtis Institute in the early 90s, but he’s keen to praise Slade-Lipkin too. ‘Without the solid, deeply-rooted foundations she gave me at the RNCM Junior School and at Chetham’s, I would not have been able to develop my career at all,’ he says simply. He touches on the emotional aspect of the teacherstudent relationship as well. ‘I had been crying during several lessons, because I couldn’t get the last page of Rachmaninov’s Prelude Op 23 No 3 right. But when I finally nailed it in a local festival, and won First Prize, I saw tears roll down her face. I knew I had finally pleased and moved her, and I’ll never forget it.’ We then move on to the charismatic figure of Eleanor Sokoloff, who died in July aged 106, and who was as sharp as a pin to the very end. (There are several hugely entertaining and highly recommended interviews with her online.) ‘Her warmth and enthusiasm for music inspired me greatly,’ says McCawley. ‘She emphasised respect for the details in the score – “don’t put your emPHAsis on the wrong syllAble” was a favourite phrase of hers – as well as communicating sincerity, humanity, joy, and humour in music. And she was a true one-off. She always sat in a rocking chair in lessons, and never let me get away with anything.’ There were some unfortunate aspects to the situation as well, however. ‘The lessons were at the ungodly (for me) hour of 8am at her home in Philadelphia, and in order to keep awake I would slip several cups of coffee down before I arrived. I would always have to use the bathroom halfway through lessons. “Leon, do you have a bladder problem?” she asked with a mischievous chuckle.’ Teaching teaches Sometimes playful mischief can curdle into something nastier. Hough recalls studying with the

‘She was a true one-off. She always sat in a rocking chair in lessons, and never let me get away with anything’ Leon McCawley, on Eleanor Sokoloff

TAP TO WATCH Watch the Nadia Boulanger documentary notoriously volatile Adele Marcus at Juilliard. ‘I got on with her: I think she liked English people, and liked men. But I heard stories of her screaming at her female students, ripping pages of scores, throwing music out of the window. Some of them would leave the lesson weeping. It was a terrible way to go about things.’ Both Hough and McCawley also teach students themselves, and I wonder if they’ve learned anything themselves from the process? (Leon Fleisher said, ‘After Schnabel, the best teacher I ever had was teaching itself.’) For Hough, who usually limits his teaching commitments in order to concentrate on performing and writing, the coronavirus crisis has opened up opportunities. The day before we speak, he’d given a Zoom class to 35 Juilliard students, all of whom had specific problems they wanted to address. ‘I felt as if Gordon and Derrick were over my shoulder, sharing the things I learned all those years ago,’ he says. ‘It’s very enriching.’ For McCawley, who has been a professor of piano at the Royal 71• Pianist 116

College of Music since 2008, also enjoys the process. ‘I’ve learned a lot from teaching, and feel that it’s helped me to be more objectively self-critical of my playing. I’m often surprised how differently I have to teach and cater to each student. Some can be pushed, while others are very sensitive, so getting the balance of being encouraging and helpfully critical is challenging – but I find I’m learning all the time both in my own playing as well as in my teaching.’ Are we any closer to solving the mystery of what makes a good teacher? Openness, respect, and a sympathetically critical ear would all seem to be advantageous elements of the mix. And of course – whatever Plato has to say on the matter – the desire to teach. n For more about Stephen Hough’s performances, recordings, writing and painting, see stephenhough.com. Leon McCawley has been sharing superb content at leonmccawley.com during lockdown, and will return to live performance with a recital at Wigmore Hall on 10 October.

R E P E R TO I R E

TAP TO WATCH Mark Viner plays Alkan’s Barcarolle

ADDICTED TO

ALKAN

Charles-Valentin Alkan was little understood in his day, but his mysterious and brilliant piano music is ripe for rediscovery, says devotee Mark Viner

I

t’s a fairly simple story. When I was a pupil at the Purcell School of Music, every year there was a spring piano course focusing on a particular area of the repertoire. Each student was assigned a piece and participated in masterclasses given by a distinguished visiting pianist. At the end of the course, we presented our pieces in a joint concert. The first year I was in school, it so happened that the focus was the music of Alkan and Chopin: more specifically, the Douze Etudes dans tous les tons majeurs Op 35 of the former presented alongside the Douze Etudes Op 25 of the latter together with a shoal of miscellaneous pieces by both composers. Initially, I was given the eighth number of the 25 Préludes dans tous les tons majeurs et mineurs Op 31, La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer, so I can say that this was the very first piece of Alkan’s music I ever played. But both my professor and I felt I needed something a bit more substantial to sink my teeth into. As a result, the prélude was substituted for the

Toccatina Op 75 which was something of a baptism of fire! Bear in mind, I was 13 at the time and only began playing when I was 11, so I had to work tremendously hard and, at the time, I confess, I disliked the piece intensely. All that was about to change. I somehow managed and the day of the masterclass came, given by none other than the great Alkan exponent, Ronald Smith (1922-2004). I still remember those classes vividly and it is difficult to describe the sense of awe he exerted over us. There he was, this bespectacled octogenarian in a tweed suit, with an aristocratic demeanour and sparkling wit, taking his seat at the piano and slipping with ease into every one of the works being played, illustrating the odd passage here and there. The results he seemed to bring out in us were tremendous. I’ll never forget his almost frightening conviction, and that impassive countenance, charged with a grave passion. This was the first time I heard Alkan’s music and what a

72• Pianist 116

Forsyth 1857

thrill it was. I remember being astounded by this extraordinary, vibrant, eccentric and strangely moving piano music. What’s more, everything about it was strange: the idiom; the daring originality; the almost total obscurity – even its appearance on the page, in grainy facsimile of the original editions, sparked an intense curiosity in me.

‘I embarked on a voyage of discovery and endeavoured to lay my hands on everything he had written’ During the following years I embarked on a voyage of discovery and endeavoured to lay my hands on everything he had written. Remember, this was before the era of IMSLP so the only way to obtain a work was through a physical copy and, by the time I left school, I remember having accumulated a pile of scores a foot tall!

LIFE OF AN ARTIST

Emma, Sarah and Paul are Forsyth’s friendly and knowledgeable team who look forward to helping you discover your ideal piano. Forsyth’s clean and safe showrooms have an unrivalled display of quality pianos, all tuned and prepared by our inhouse technical team, so whatever your requirement you are sure to find something of interest. Although you can walk into our showroom our new appointment system has proved very popular. This allows generous time periods of exclusive access to our vast range of pianos – shy pianists need no-longer be afraid! Agents for August-Forster, Bechstein, Bösendorfer, Fridolin, Hoffmann, Kawai, Ritmuller, Schimmel, Shigeru-Kawai, Wilhelm and Yamaha plus quality pre-owned pianos by Steinway and others To start your journey call Emma, Sarah or Paul direct on 0161 519 1996 email: [email protected] www.forsyths.co.uk

▲

Born in Paris on 30 November 1813, Charles-Valentin Alkan was the second of six children of a prodigiously musical family. At the age of six he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire where he studied under Pierre-JosephGuillaume Zimmerman (1785-1853), winning a number of prizes including first prize in solfège in 1821, first prize in piano in 1824 and first prize in harmony in 1827. By 1828 he published his Opus 1 and it was not long before he began to establish himself as one of France’s leading pianists, his public appearances including two visits to England in 1834 and 1835. While initial rivalry with Franz Liszt (1811-1886) developed into a friendly camaraderie, he forged a close friendship with Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) and, at the height of his fame in 1837, he moved to the fashionable Square d’Orléans where, in 1842, the latter became his next-door neighbour. Activity was interrupted by the birth of his illegitimate son, Elie-Miriam Delaborde (1839-1913), and it was not until 1844 that he finally returned to the concert platform. A further setback came in 1848. Following Zimmerman’s retirement as head of piano at the Conservatoire, it was generally expected that Alkan, his most famous pupil, would succeed him. Instead, a far lesser candidate, Antoine Marmontel (1816-1898) was elected due to political favouritism – it was a position he was to hold for the next 24 years. The death of Chopin in 1849 was another deeply felt blow. Giving but two last concerts in 1853, Alkan withdrew into reclusion for some 20 years. It was during this period that much of his finest music was composed while he occupied himself with translating the entire Bible from its original languages into French, an incredible exercise he carried out for his own personal gratification.

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126 Deansgate, Manchester, M3 2GR

ALKAN INSIDE PIANIST Mark Viner on the three Alkan pieces inside this issue Charles-Valentin ALKAN (1813-1888)

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major, A major, F sharp minor and G minor), even ending with a barcarolle. Mendelssohn’s ‘songs’ were composed between 1830 and 1845; Alkan’s between 1857 and the early 1870s. Pianist Mark Viner has added some detailed fingerings onto the score (note that those fingerings in italic are by Alkan himself ). For playing tips, read Mark Viner’s article on page 72.

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This lyrical and rather sentimental piece by Alkan is the third of his six Recueil de Chants (Collection of Songs) Op 65. Alkan wrote five volumes of Chants: Opp 38 (two books), 65, 67 and 70. He took as his inspiration and model Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, not merely sharing their harmonic language and length, but following the key sequence of Mendelssohn’s first book, Op 19 (E major, A minor, A

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55• Pianist 116

52• Pianist 116

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emerge, barely detectable above the omnipresent sea swell. The piece is decades ahead of its time – if ever there were a Turner in music, this is it. Challenge yourself to master playing the left-hand chords as evenly as possible. By this, I mean all four notes played with equal weight at a hushed pianissimo – the effect this produces is far more sinister than any voicing of upper or lower notes can muster. To beat the hand into submission, use the following practice method: (x3)

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INTERMEDIATE

that moves alternately up a fourth and down a third. La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer (The song of the mad woman on the shore) has a completely different feel, conveying deep tones of the sea itself combined with increasing tension from the mad woman’s ‘voice’. For playing tips on this piece, read Mark Viner’s article on Alkan on page 72.

Op 31 No 1.

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Alkan’s 25 Préludes dans tous les tons majeurs et mineurs were first published in 1847, and were designed to be played on the piano or organ. The préludes go through all 24 keys, returning to a final Prière (Prayer) in the original key of C major. The 25 Préludes comprise three suites (Nos 1-9, 10-17 and 18-25). The first set starts out calmly with No 1, printed on the previous page, and proceeds in a sequence of keys

Charles-Valentin ALKAN (1813-1888)

TRACK 13

Prélude Op 31 No 8 La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer: Lentement

TRACK 12

It intentions were vastly different. example reveals the two composers’ the form like Chopin, Alkan cultivated would also be fair to argue that, own art form which is justified in its of the prelude into a more elevated prefix rattled off to flex the muscles right, rather than a quasi-improvised programmed work. before launching into a more substantial Prélude on page 72 for playing tips on Turn to Mark Viner’s article

∏∏∏∏∏

Prélude Op 31 No 1 (p51) The smooth, glassy textures of this opening prélude, together with its nonchalant rhythmic scheme, instills a sense of serenity through its iterations. The melody, harnessed within the confines of an octave, render it effectively a miniature study in voicing which might serve as a valuable pendant to the study of other such pieces – notably the second of Saint-Saëns’s Six Etudes Pour l’indépendance des doigts Op 52 or, closer to home, Alkan’s mighty étude, Posément, the eleventh number of the Douze Etudes dans tous les tons majeurs Op 35. The main difficulty in such writing lies in voicing the melodic line while ensuring that the rest of the notes in the chord are struck with it simultaneously; a tall order, on reflection, as this means the melodic line must be struck with greater speed than its companions, necessitating their being played a fraction earlier! All very complicated in theory but quite simple in practice. The following practice method will help accustom the hand to the requisite minutiae of muscular movements:

Charles-Valentin ALKAN (1813-1888)

INTERMEDIATE

Prélude Op 31 No 1, Lentement

TRACK 11

25 Préludes dans tous les tons majeurs Introduction by Mark Viner: Alkan’s in three volumes by Brandus of et mineurs Op 31 were first published the to Mme. James Odier, wife of Paris in 1847 bearing a dedication Op 47 dedicatee of the Sonate de concert cellist who was to later become we may feel tempted to draw an (1857) for cello and piano. While set by Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), invidious comparison with the earlier, a cursory glance at Alkan’s which appeared some eight years

Prélude Op 31 No 8 (p52) Perhaps the most famous prélude of the set is the haunting La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer (The song of the madwoman on the shore). The atmosphere of the piece is cast through the vast tessitura (texture): the left hand, engaged in a hypnotic ostinato, paints the sea swell while high above, the madwoman sings her song. The obsessive rhythm and use of flattened sevenths bestow a folk-like inflection before the woman’s song is pronounced in the major where it gathers momentum and reaches a frenzied climax before petering out. Notice how at the reprise, her song resumes, wraithlike, where fleeting snatches just

En canon à l’8ve Op 65 No 3 (p55) Here we have one of Alkan’s most ravishing conceptions; a love duet of aching poignancy, its romance quaintly framed by two yesteryear flourishes. Don’t be apologetic about either of these framing quasi-Baroque flourishes: no ritenuto at the end of either; play as though the music suddenly breaks off, which it does. Mark the entry of each voice clearly; it might be a song without words, but it’s still a canon. Practise this by playing each voice separately from the accompaniment, without pedal, using the exact same fingering as when played with the chords.

Compositional activity gradually ceased – his last published work appearing in 1872 – before he made a phoenix-like return to the concert platform where he established a series of Six Petits Concerts de Musique Classique. This activity gradually came to an end and he entered an even greater period of seclusion until his death on 29 March, 1888 – an event which generated such convoluted rumour that, until relatively recently, it was widely accepted that he was killed by a falling bookcase. This tall tale is, alas, apocryphal, though it has nonetheless persisted.

UNIQUE VOICE Alkan’s compositional output is extensive and comprises some of the most extraordinary music ever conceived for the piano. His mighty Douze Etudes dans tous les tons mineurs Op 39 (1857) – the epic sequel to the Douze Etudes dans tous les tons majeurs Op 35 (1848) – is the fullest embodiment of his creative powers. This monumental set of studies runs to 277 pages, lasting over two hours, and comprises some of Alkan’s finest music including a Symphony, Concerto and Overture for solo piano together with a magnificent set of variations on an

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▲

Strike each melodic note firmly but take care to still shape the line, as one would anything else, while using this method. Be sure that the dotted rhythm is most definitely dotted and isn’t emasculated by the preceding languorous triplet.

Roll the chord vigorously three times up, then down, with a still wrist, using the fingers very well; think of the Italian term strappato (torn/ripped). After practising each chord thus for a few moments, your control should increase tenfold. Don’t be shy when it comes to Alkan’s pedal marking throughout: he means it. At the long repos (bar 31) wait for as long as you dare!

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THE COMPLETE ALKAN Mark Viner on the colossal task of recording Alkan’s complete piano music Well, this wasn’t something I ever intended to do at the outset, but was a gradual conviction. I always wanted to eventually record the major works and had at least a third of his oeuvre in my repertoire already. So after I recorded the Douze Etudes dans tous les tons majeurs Op 35, which was actually something my producer persuaded me to do initially, it gradually occurred to me that if anyone were to make a complete recording of Alkan’s piano works, I should be the one to do it. I’ve known and studied this music most of my life and have always had a strong sense of conviction when it came to interpreting it so, ultimately, it feels like it is a duty of mine to make a reliable, comprehensive recording which fills in the gaps. In terms of challenges, the obvious one lies in the fact that much of the music takes little heed of human frailty, but I knew this when I committed to the project and difficulty was never something which particularly bothered me. The less obvious challenge is an off-shoot of the latter in that the real difficulty often lies in presenting much of this repertoire on the modern piano, with its heavier action and totally different sonority. Much of Alkan’s music, particularly the virtuoso stuff, makes full use of the piano of the time, with its lighter action and thinner, more silvery sound, and, where playing some of this repertoire can feel like a stretch on an Erard from 1840, playing it on a Steinway D of today requires a totally different approach. One’s approach to sonority also has to be more considered on a modern instrument (especially where thick bass sonorities are concerned) and metronome marks sometimes have to be brought down a notch or two for clarity – not to mention the physical demands imposed by the heavier actions of today’s instruments. All in all, I endeavour to present an as accurate and faithful representation of each work as I possibly can.

original theme, entitled Le festin d’Esope. Other major works include the Grande Sonate Op 33 (1847) and the Sonatine Op 61 (1861). Many of these works contain passages that are utterly unique in the literature, from which pianists can only benefit. Much of the writing indicates that he must have been in possession of an almost frightening command of the instrument, fully corroborating the rumour that he was the only pianist before whom Liszt felt ill-at-ease to perform.

‘No survey of Alkan’s music would be complete without an exploration of his shorter pieces of which there are well over a hundred’ But, Alkan was a man of extremes: While much of his music is for the virtuoso, there is a great deal which is isn’t, and some which is beguilingly simple. While he has been described as an architect of the colossal, he is also a jeweller of exquisite miniatures and no survey of Alkan’s music would be complete without an exploration of his shorter pieces of which there are well over a hundred. The 48 Motifs (Esquisses) Op 63 (1861) is one such work, comprising a kaleidoscopic plethora of emotions, eras and worlds, many of them well within the grasp of the fluent amateur. A particularly unique attribute of Alkan’s musical language lies in the fact that while his imagination is boundless, the structural tautness, together with the very weft of the writing, very often reveals a rigorous discipline paradoxically at odds with the eccentricity of the music itself. This is because many of those very eccentricities – stinging harmonic piquancies, for instance – are often wrought from an entirely logical means. This is something which has been described by the composer, John White (b.1936), as ‘the exposition of mysterious order’, referring to the kind of surprises which occur in spite of (and more often because of ) the strict compositional discipline that is involved. Ultimately, Alkan was a classicist: he rejected the New German School, yielding to the more conservative language of composers such as Mendelssohn, Schumann and Weber – yet, in doing so, he turned the rule book on its head, forging a potent and unique musical language of his own. n Mark Viner plays Le vent, No 2 from Alkan’s Souvenirs: Trois morceaux dans le genre pathétique Op 15, on this issue’s covermount. To date, he has released three Alkan albums on the Piano Classics label (www.piano-classics.com), with more to follow.

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77• Pianist 116

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A BEAUTIFUL MIND

E

ach year, on 10 October, the World Health Organisation recognises World Mental Health Day. According to the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, conducted in 2014 by the UK’s National Health Service, one in six people in the past week experienced a common mental health problem. But what is mental health? According to the WHO, mental health is a dynamic, ever-changing state. Depending on our circumstances we may feel down, stressed or anxious one day but fine the next.

By ‘fine’ the organisation means being in a state of mind that allows us to make the most of our potential, deal with the ups and downs of daily life and play a full part in family, community and social life. It means being able to learn, to express and manage positive and negative emotions, to form and maintain relationships through thick and thin, and to manage and deal with change and uncertainty. According to the APMS, among those people suffering mental health problems, one in ten experience anxiety or depression – symptoms usually described as neurotic. Less 78• Pianist 116

common symptoms, described as psychotic, affect a person’s perception of reality and may be accompanied by hallucinations. Of course, mental health is a deeply personal issue that can take many forms. Even so, one expert has a simple strategy for managing it that will come as no surprise to readers of Pianist. ‘We know that playing a musical instrument is a creative skill that can help people suffering with problems including depression, anxiety-based disorders, trauma and grief,’ says Dave Smithson, operations director of Anxiety UK, a mental health charity. ‘It’s what we

Main picture © EvgeniyBobrov/AdobeStock

As World Mental Health Day approaches, John Evans talks to the experts about a much-discussed subject – that playing the piano, or indeed any instrument, is good for your wellbeing

call a mindful activity which, because it requires a lot of our attention, helps to take our minds off the thoughts and feelings that clog our brains. ‘These thoughts and feelings are just that; they’re not facts. We have a notice in our office that says, ‘What if – so what?’ It refers to the fact that often, any anxiety we feel is caused by the fact we worry about things over which we have little control.’ According to Smithson, playing the piano allows us to rid ourselves of these negative thoughts by allowing us to process and channel them. ‘The great thing is, playing the piano or doing any mindful activity that demands our attention, is not just a temporary fix. For many sufferers whose condition is receptive to it, it can bring longterm benefits – but only so long as they continue with the activity.’

You don’t have to perform at Carnegie Hall to feel better about yourself. Here are five ways to feel great, just by playing in your front room 1 Boost your concentration by structuring your practice sessions and setting achievable targets. 2 Analyse and deconstruct technical difficulties rather than fudging them. 3 Work on multiple pieces to keep your mind engaged. 4 Challenge your brain by memorising the music. 5 Perform to friends and family to give yourself goals, and to give your audience pleasure.

researchers in Finland and Norway in 2011 which found that music therapy can improve the treatment of depression. Patients were invited to play a range of percussion instruments during a three-month trial period. At its conclusion, those patients receiving music therapy plus standard care showed a significantly greater improvement in their symptoms than those receiving standard care alone. However, three months after the trial ceased, both groups recorded similar results.

THE POWER OF THE PIANO It may just be a musical instrument but according to Dr Debra Shipman, a nurse educator at the Salem VAMC in Virginia and a piano student at the Performing Arts Institute of Virginia in Blacksburg, the humble piano is a wonder drug for our minds, too • Reading music and playing the piano enhances mood and quality of living, especially among older adults. Studies have reported less acute feelings of isolation, reduced anxiety and enhanced brain function. • The brain functions on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis and playing a musical instrument such as the piano helps reorganise the brain’s neural pathways. • Playing a musical instrument, as distinct from merely listening to music, helps reduce the incidence of dementia. Studies have found six months of piano lessons in older adults improves brain function, memory and dexterity. • Playing the piano lowers cortisol levels and decreases anxiety, which also aids disease prevention.

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Writing in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Michael Crawford, a psychiatrist, explains why music therapy helps people suffering with depression. ‘Listening and creating music allows individuals to express themselves in non-verbal ways. The interplay of melody, harmony, and rhythm stimulates the senses and promotes calmness. Musical engagement boosts levels of the hormone dopamine.’ In short, music makes us feel better. Chris O’Sullivan, Head of

▲

Further findings Smithson’s remarks are supported by a study undertaken by

WAY TO A BETTER MOOD R U O Y Y PLA

M I N D & B O DY Business Development and Engagement at the Mental Health Foundation, London, adds: ‘Whilst we can’t say conclusively that playing an instrument is helpful for people with depression, or can protect and improve our mental health more generally, there is certainly reason to believe that it could. Being absorbed in a creative activity that uses our skills may help to distract us, relax us and lift us emotionally. Playing may also provide ways to explore emotions through music, and may help to reconnect us to things with meaning in our lives. ‘It’s important to say that for some people, the experience of depression may include feeling unable to concentrate on playing, or lead to harsh self-criticism. If that’s the case for you, then remember that when the fog lifts, your joy in music will return. Checking in once in a while and playing even for a short time, may help. For those of us looking for a hobby or skill that will keep our minds sharp and give us an outlet to express ourselves, playing an instrument can be a worthwhile hobby – presenting an opportunity to be social with others, or creative in private.’ A pianist’s story Clare Hammond, a concert pianist who in 2016 was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist award, suffers depression but has found salvation performing music

THE CONCERTO THAT CONQUERED DEPRESSION After the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony, Sergei Rachmaninov was plunged into a depression that lasted for three years. He suffered insomnia, lost his self-confidence and stopped composing. In desperation and on the recommendation of his aunt, he sought help from Dr Nikolai Dahl, a hypnotherapist who also employed cognitive therapy techniques. Rachmaninov recalled that at the end of each session Dahl would put him into a trance and reassure him that he would compose a great concerto. As the treatment progressed, Rachmaninov noticed his depression lift and he began work on the piece that would seal his reputation, the Piano Concerto No 2. It is dedicated to Dr Dahl.

to people beyond the concert hall. ‘As performers we have to be extremely focused, even as young children before we embark on a career,’ she says. ‘The profession is very competitive and you have to develop a high level of skill. I thrived on these demands but found this self-centred frame of mind increasingly challenging to deal with.’ Ironically, it was discovering music’s power to connect people that

USEFUL CONTACTS If you or someone you know are affected by the issues raised in this story, you may find the following services helpful The NHS publishes an extensive A-Z of UK-based mental health charities that may be of help www.nhs.uk Anxiety UK provides therapy services to help combat this debilitating condition anxietyuk.org.uk Musicians are three times more likely to suffer anxiety or depression. Discover how you can help them at helpmusicians.org.uk

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transformed her outlook and set Clare on the path to recovery. ‘I cannot explain what is happening cognitively but experientially, I began to understand the communicative aspect that lies at the core of music. This profoundly impacted both my recovery and, subsequently, my artistic development. ‘I started to perform in prisons and saw the radical effect that classical music can have on people in difficult circumstances, even if they have no prior experience of the genre. Music offers us a chance to escape, inspires hope and fosters strength. Through seeing its power to affect the mental health of others, I began to understand the value of my own work.’ For all musicians and pianists who may be suffering with depression, Clare offers some words of encouragement. ‘Although it can feel utterly overwhelming at the time, we learn so much about ourselves and the human condition from adverse experience. Know that others have been there before you and found a way through. Play or listen to music that tells that story and know this will not last forever.’ n

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81• Pianist 116

REVIEW

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Reviews by Michael MacMillan READY TO PLAY BOOKS 1 & 2 Sally Cathcart Alfred Music ISBN: 9 781470 613440 (Bk 1); -613457 (Bk 2) Sally Cathcart is a piano teacher, ABRSM examiner, and co-founder of The Curious Piano Teachers, an online community for piano teachers. These two workbooks aimed at young beginners and written for the first year of study are quite unlike any educational piano book that I have come across. The development of musicianship comes first in these books, utilising activities that focus on rhythm, pulse, singing, and creativity, underscored by solfège and the Kodály method. The piano is merely the instrument through which these concepts are explored, so they are designed to be used alongside, rather than in place of, piano tutorials. Attractive illustrations and novel ways of explaining concepts enhance the overall package. This is a refreshingly original product, and a CD or online resource demonstrating all the songs for children to listen to would surely have made it better still. More books are planned in this auspicious series. [Note: the author has since brought our attention to a SoundCloud playlist – bit.ly/readytoplaySC – where one can listen to all the tracks.]

IMPROVE YOUR SIGHT-READING! A PIECE A WEEK (GRADE 6) Paul Harris Faber ISBN: 0-57154139-9 Not to be confused with the excellent sightreading workbooks previously published by Paul Harris from Grades 1 to 8 entitled Improve your sight-reading!, this new series of books currently available from Grades 1 to 6 contain pieces that are designed to be learnt in a week. In so doing, a student increases the amount of new material they cover over a period of time, thereby exposing them to more notation which, in theory, leads to gains in sight-reading ability. The pieces are almost all a page long, around Grades 3-4, and are typically characterful, humorous, and well-written for the instrument. One could just learn other pieces around the same level in a week for the same effect, but these books are nevertheless a useful resource that address a vital and oft-neglected skill. [Fans of Paul Harris might wish to turn to his full-length article on sight-reading which appeared inside issue 111.]

RELAX WITH MEDITATIVE PIANO

Schott ED 23081 This is the sixth book in Schott’s Relax with series which has to date covered Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Folk, and French Impressionist genres. A generous quantity of music – 40 pieces that take up almost a hundred pages – have been selected in this latest anthology by Samantha Ward for their reflective and dreamy qualities. Representing 30-odd composers, the pieces are presented in order of difficulty, from George Nevada’s When Paris Dreams (Grade 1) to Rachmaninov’s Elégie (Grade 8). There are pieces inside that will be familiar to many readers, but there are also several lesser-known attractive works that are sure to catch your eye including John Kember’s Soft Blue, Eduard Pütz's Sentimental Lady and Gretchaninoff’s Lamentation. Although a more spacious engraving would be desirable in places, as well as introductory notes to the pieces which are currently absent, the overall package is recommendable alongside the other volumes in the series.

HERMANN BENDIX Three Early Piano Pieces Two Piano Pieces Op 20 Two Piano Pieces Op 25 Edition Dohr ISMN: M-2020-4051-5 (early pieces); -4071-3 (Op 20); -4072-0 (Op 25) Who was Hermann Bendix, and why are his compositions being published by Edition Dohr at premium prices? The first question is easier to answer than the second. Bendix (1859-1935) was a German teacher, organist, and composer. His compositional output is quite modest, covering instruments such as the organ, harmonium, voice, and piano; Edition Dohr have already published around a dozen books of his music. The seven pieces contained in these three books are between five and nine pages long, and are around Grade 7 to 8. The music is pianistically written in salon-style, and although none of the pieces require effort on the part of the listener, this ‘easygoing’ quality of writing might reduce its long-term appeal and depth of interest (it’s the sort of music you can just hear rather than listen to!). Titles for the pieces, the introductory notes and critical commentary are only printed in German, which is limiting. This is perhaps a reflection of the anticipated scope of its distribution. 82• Pianist 116

BEETHOVEN Sonata No 13 Op 27 No 1 Sonata No 22 Op 54 Sonata No 26 Op 81a ‘Les Adieux’ Henle ISMN: 979-0-2018-0724-9 (No 13); -1311-0 (No 22); -0723-2 (No 26) What do András Schiff, Mitsuko Uchida, MarcAndré Hamelin, Lars Vogt, and Murray Perahia have in common – apart from being world-renowned pianists? The answer is that they have all contributed fingering suggestions in editions of music published by Henle. Murray Perahia is also the co-editor of Henle’s new edition of the complete Beethoven Sonatas, which is now well beyond the halfway stage. Several of these sonatas have already featured on this page, and these three sonatas (which were remarkably all composed within the space of a decade) enjoy the same improvements in presentation and clarity noted previously over Henle’s older edition. They similarly benefit from the detailed preface and introductory remarks from the editorial team. If you prefer not to have editorial fingering, look to Bärenreiter’s edition or if you’d like detailed editorial input, I’d recommend Stewart Gordon’s edition for Alfred music.

MODAL EXPLORATION FOR PIANO Darren Fellows Spartan Press ISMN: 979-0-57998-352-1 Darren Fellows (b.1975) is a British musician with a diverse portfolio of compositions, ranging from trumpet concertos to brass quintets to jazzy woodwind arrangements to bilingual nursery rhyme arrangements. Modal Exploration is one of two books he has published through Spartan Press, and as the title suggests the content is based on the church modes. Twelve one-page pieces follow three pages of explanatory notes about modes, with at least one piece written in each mode. They are all around Grade 3-4, ranging in mood from the gentle and expressive (Last Goodbye) to the energetic and upbeat (Let it Go!). Many of the pieces feature rhythmic challenges and the overall collection is not without interest, although the complete absence of fingering is unusual at this level. If you fancy exploring modal music in duet form, check out Graham Buckland’s Ancient Modes of Transport from Bärenreiter [reviewed inside issue 115].

HAYDN 55 SONATAS 55 PIANISTS

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The Piano Sonatas in Urtext Joseph Haydn’s Piano Sonatas have been available in Henle Urtext editions since the 1960s and have now been supplied with revised texts that reflect the latest scholarly research. 55 internationally recognised pianists each agreed to adopt one of the piano sonatas, furnishing it with their own fingerings.

A “who’s who” of the contemporary piano world: Emanuel Ax, Sa Chen, Angela Hewitt, Sunwook Kim, Evgeny Kissin, Igor Levit, Murray Perahia, András Schiff, Daniil Trifonov, Christian Zacharias and many more

Piano Sonatas Volume I Hob. XVI:1 –14, 16, 18 –19, 44 – 46, 47bis, 5a, Es2, Es3, G1, XVII:D1 HN 1336 with fingering, paperbound HN 1337 with fingering, clothbound HN 1536 without fingering, paperbound Piano Sonatas Volume II Hob. XVI:20 – 32, 35 – 39 HN 1338 with fingering, paperbound HN 1339 with fingering, clothbound HN 1538 without fingering, paperbound Piano Sonatas Volume III Hob. XVI:33 – 34, 40 – 43, 48 – 52 HN 1340 with fingering, paperbound HN 1341 with fingering, clothbound HN 1540 without fingering, paperbound

Finest Urtext Editions

www.henle.de/en/Haydn55 81• Pianist 116

The Next Generation of the Bösendorfer Concert Grand Breathtaking dynamics, astounding colours and exhilarating brilliance: the new Bösendorfer 280VC – Vienna Concert – represents the culmination of Bösendorfer’s legendary approach to piano crafting. Pure emotion at play. www.boesendorfer.com

CG

VC

Concert Grand

Vienna Concert

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