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Perhaps I can add a little to what Dejan has to relate about Richter’s practice habits. I do not doubt that Richter may have experimented with various ways of preparing for a concert, some of which may have seemed unorthodox. He never played exercises of any sort. I knew this from my aunt Dagmar even before he came to the U.S., he himself confirmed it to me, and he does so also in Bruno Monsaignon’s film. It seems very much in character. Since he never played compositions he did not like, why would he have played exercises? And of course we all wonder how it was possible for him to acquire such a phenomenal technique without ever playing exercises. He himself was not usually happy with his playing. When I was visiting him in New York during his 1970 tour he confided to me that he had only recently learned to practice properly, and thought that he would be playing much better if only he could discipline himself to practice three hours each day. I wish I had pursued the subject with him in more detail that day, for he did not tell me what ’proper practicing’ was or what he had done in the past that was so wrong. Perhaps he meant that in the past his approach was less disciplined. My aunt used to tell me (she had visited him in Moscow shortly before the War) that he might practice endless hours one day and then go several days hardly touching the piano. When I saw him, he tended to practice by the hour, rather than setting himself a particular goal and working at it until he felt he had accomplished it. Perhaps he did that too, but I did not observe it. I have heard him practicing in Boston (1960, 1970), in New York (1970), and in Philadelphia (1970). Never did I hear a single scale or exercise of any sort. He would work on whatever he was going to perform, playing things through close to the tempo called for. Now there may be a difference here between practicing to maintain repertoire and refreshing a piece he had not played in while or even learning a new piece. He told me that he liked giving concerts every couple of days because he had to work less hard to ’keep in shape’ than when he had a long layoff. In 1960 I was with him at the Ritz Carton Hotel in Boston as he was practicing the Tchaikovsky 1st and the two Liszt concerti, all in the course of some two hours. I believe he played them all from beginning to end, stopping only occasionally to repeat certain passages. He obviously knew them quite well (he was to play the Liszt with Kondrashin the following year), and when I asked him what he was striving for in his practice session, he said that he wanted to make sure that his memory of the score was accurate. He seemed to have few technical problems to work out. Similarly, in New York in 1970 I heard him practicing Prokofiev 7th Sonata, Beethoven Var. Op. 34, 35 & 76, Schubert’s Huttenbrenner Variations, and Bartok 15 Hungarian Peasant Songs--all in the same afternoon. Perhaps his comment to me in 1970 summarizes his approach. He said that during practice one should play expressively and carefully observe all the dynamics, but that one should also hold back a little and save one’s full range expression and power for the performance. His practice fortissimos were certainly not what you heard from him in concert. This notion of ’saving oneself’ for the concert may derive from a desire to allow room for spontaneity. He hated to pick out pianos for his

concerts and preferred to be surprised (something he reiterates in Monsaingeon’s film), and I suspect that perhaps the idea of fine-tuning his performance during practice was alien to him the for that same reason. Something had to be left to chance, to the inspiration of the moment. He said that the mood he was in at a concert played an important role in its success. Most of all he feared apathy. Some of his best concerts, he said, were when he was angry or elated. Moods also affected his practicing. Once, when he was in New York in 1970, Nina and I prepared to go out, but he stayed behind, reluctantly, saying that he had to practice, even though he did not really want to. He seemed depressed. I surreptitiously had left the tape recorder on. He practiced for about an hour the Beethoven Variations Op. 76, and it was clear that he was very frustrated with how things were going. Lots of missed notes, it almost sounded as if he had not quite learned the piece or had forgotten it (yet a few days later he played it brilliantly at Carnegie Hall). He would stop and repeat certain passages over and over again, sometimes slowly, but generally most of it was played close to performance tempo, perhaps just a shade slower. When we returned Nina asked how the practicing had gone, and he made a face and said that his fingers had felt like noodles ("kak makaroni", in Russian). In the spring of 1970, when he was recuperating from the flu that had caused him to cancel a number of concerts, he stayed with his (and my) aunt Dagmar (aka. Tamara) in Somerville, MA. They had arranged to put a Steinway upright there (no room for a grand), and he religiously practiced the Beethoven Diabelli Variations three or four hours a day. I was there during one session as he practiced Variations 24-33. I sat by and watched, and occasionally he would comment or ask questions. He said that he had found the best way to play pianissimo was to play ’from the shoulder.’ I understand this to mean that there should be no wrist or elbow movement. He also believed that because our hands are interdependent, one hand can help the other out in difficult passages. One several occasions when he made a mistake in some right hand passage work he would say: ’See, I didn’t help out with the left!’ He tended to work on one or two variations at a time, repeating again and again at near performance tempo. He would observe all the repeats (but then he is well known for that). Sometimes he would experiment. When practicing Variations 26 & 27 he asked me if I thought that perhaps Variation 27 (marked Vivace) should be faster (he was practicing it as the same tempo as the previous one), and he proceeded to play Presto. It was stunning, and I thought it was a nice contrast to the previous variation. I told him that I liked it faster. He thought for a moment and then said he liked it better slower. He did not elaborate, but I think it is often characteristic of him to strive for understatement (even though he is known to go for extreme tempi --fast or slow, as well as for great dynamic contrasts). A little later, feeling a bit cocky and privileged to have had my opinion solicited, I ventured to ask why he played Variatioon 29 in such a restrained way. Why, for instance, in bars 5 and 6, he did not make more of the crescendo and diminuendo marked in the score. His answer was that that would be too much, the

implication being that he wanted to hint at the pathos rather than milk every last drop from it. I remember how he expressed great dissatisfaction with the way Leonid Kogan had played the Prokofiev Second Violin Concerto (coupled on the Monitor LP with Richter’s Bach D minor Concerto). He felt it was much too romantic, cloyingly sweet. ’You should listen to how Oistrakh plays it.’ he said. As for the Diabelli Variations, he said to me that he thought the last variation was the most difficult variation to play, perhaps the most difficult piece in all of Beethoven. And that in the last variation the most difficult part was the ending, so that if you can’t play the ending well, you can’t play the last variation, which means you really cannot perform the Diabelli Variations. He never did play them in America. He was apparently dissatisfied with how he was playing them, even though that afternoon he had practiced the redoubtable 33rd variation many times. What I heard was certainly marvelous, and he seemed to be fairly happy with what he had accomplished that day. At another time in 1970, when I was with him in his hotel (I forgot the name, but it was on Central Park South, in the center of the block, with a great view of Central Park), he practiced the Prokofiev Seventh. He tended to play through fairly long sections of the Sonata at a fairly brisk pace, though more slowly than later in performance. Only a few passages, such as the one marked ’tumultuoso’ (first movement, shortly after the return to the Allegro), he would practic more slowly three or four times, but otherwise everything was in tempo and with relatively little concentration on specific details. A few comments he made, reinforced my impression that his interpretations are often controlled by visual images which the music evokes in him. In talking about the Prokofiev Seventh (and other war time sonatas of his) he said that you could hear machine guns firing and explosions. As he was practicing the first movement, in the Allegro section some 20 bars before the return to the Andantino theme (where it begins in f), he commented: ’What he conveys so well is a sense of dread! There is always something rather disquieting.’ And I said, thinking of the passage marked ’senza Ped.’ that the percussive nature of those chords struck me as machine-like. He answered, ’No, no, not really. It is more as if people are riding on horse-back along a road...there are telephone poles passing by...they are going away somewhere, and it is a kind of gray overcast day.’ It made me recall a similar comment he had made ten years earlier, this time about the Mozart d minor concerto. It was when I was with him in Boston as he practiced the Tchaikovsky and Liszt concerti. During a break we talked a little, mostly about music. I asked him (I marvel now at my chutzpah) why he played the middle section of the Romanze so slowly. Having been introduced to this concerto through a recording by Clara Haskil, who plays the middle section quite tempestuously, as do most other pianists I have heard, I found Richter’s slow pace inappropriate, if not perverse (I didn’t say that, of course). To me it conjured up a storm (I was thinking of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Vivaldi’s Summer). He shrugged and said, ’But you see, what I imagine here is a running brook...a waterfall...’ At another time, talking about Beethoven’s Appassionata he remarked how the last movement becomes

progressively more wild and then with the Presto it turns into some kind of dance of witches and devils. I believe that his playing was always deeply affected by the visual images the music suggested to him, and perhaps it was this capacity for visualizing sound that may have enabled him control and balance the larger musical structures so well. Walter Moskalew Muncie, IN wam@...

Re: How did great pianist s practic e? « Reply #3 on: January 07, 2004, 03:22:2 5 PM » This is a very good question. However I think one has to be a bit more specific on what is meant by practice. There are two extremes here. In one extreme we have any piano related activity. Anna Magdalena Bach, simply by copying by hand copy after copy of hubby’s compositions could be said to be practising. Does it include things like memorising a piece from the score without ever getting near to the piano? If so, Glenn Gould and Walter Gieseking were practising for most of their waking hours. On the other extreme, we can define practice (just for the purposes of this discussion) as time spent at the piano repeating patterns of movements. If so, Glen Gould could rightly claim that he never practised. And here is another interesting question. Most pianists practised a lot (whatever your definition) during their younger years, and much much less in their maturity. Ed mentioned Arrau practising up to 18 hours before he was twenty. Yet in his sixties, he never practised more than 3 hours a day, and advised his students to do the same. So do they practice less because: i. If you practice 18 hours a day for a number of years, after that you do not need that much practice. (Btu you still need to do 18 hours daily for a while). ii. They were practising wrongly in their youth and wasting a lot of time, however, as they figured it out, they realised that you don’t need all that practice anyway, and they just wished they knew in their youth what they knew in their mature years. Interestingly enough, you have pianists who firmly believe (i) or (ii). (By that I mean that there is no consensus). Paderewski (when under Leschetizky): all day long. Glenn Gould – Claimed he never practised (that is, at the piano). However did a lot of mental practice. Claudio Arrau (mature) – 2 – 3 hours daily – took one month completely off every year.

Sviatoslav Richter – Claimed to practise a few hours a day – immediately dismissed by his wife who said he was lying and set the record straight: ten hours a day. Mischa Dichter – 12 hours a day in his younger years. Then 4 – 6 hours daily. Ivo Pogorelich – 5 hours a day (when possible) Bella Davidovich – 3 hours a day (sometimes 4 or 5) Willhelm Bachauss – minimum of 1 hour a day of scales and technical exercises. Katharine Goodson – no more than four hours a day. Guiomar Novaes – 3 – 4 hours a day (never practised technique outside pieces in her mature years). Alexander Brailovsky – “I don’t practise very much, only five hours a day”. Walter Gieseking – “I really need very little practice, as I do not forget what I have learned: my fingers don’t forget either”. (But then he did a lot of mental practice). Took two months away from the piano every year. Sergei Prokofiev – “I do not need so much to practise. My hands do not forget” (But then, a lot of what he played was his own music). Vladimir Ashkenazy (in his prime) – 5 – 7 hours daily Alfred Brendel - (around 1980) – 5 hours a day (I understand that now he tries to confine his practise even more: 2 – 3 hours - but he compensates for it with a lot of mental practice) Youri Egorov – 4 – 5 hours daily. Zoltan Kocsis – in his younger years a lot. Then no more than 4 hours daily. Garrick Ohlson – 3 – 4 hours daily. [Sources: James Cooke – Great pianists on piano playing; Elyse Mach – Great contemporary pianists speak for themselves; Jeffery Johnson (ed.) – Piano mastery – The Harriet Brower interviews; David Dubal – The world of the concert pianist; interviews in several magazines].

Re: How did great pianists practice? « Reply #24 on: January 17, 2004, 02:22:27

Quote perhaps we should now talk about HOW they practiced, rather than how MUCH there are a few mostly self taught pianists, such as godowsky, richter, and cziffra (although he did go to the liszt academy) i must admit i don't know much about the practicing METHODS of the

PM »

greats- that seems to be their closely guarded secret. Excellent idea! I didn't know that Godowsky was self-taught. Glenn Gould: Did only mental practice. Walter Gieseking: Mostly mental practice. Rudolf Serkin and Wilhelm Bachaus: Crazy about scales. Argerich: practises little. plays a lot. Claudio Arrau: Was a great believer in practising on a silent keyboard. David Barr-Illam - Used an interesting practising method: He played silently on a real piano, which means that he had to depress the keys in such a way that no sound came of it (very slowly and controlled). Try it! Jorge Bolet - Hated practising (but did it anyway). Alfred Brendel - Considers slow practice misguided. One should always practise at the actual thempo (or faster). John Browning: "Many people work with tunnel vision. They work on one little section for days and days – or they whiz through the whole work quickly. I learn carefully, conscientiously observing every marking, so I don’t have to undo bad habits. I then practise in middle tempo, not too slow, which is the hardest tempo to practise in. When I feel more or less ready, I play the whole piece straight through, three times in the day, no matter what goes wrong. I try to achieve a large arc, which is what you have to do in a performance. You cannot stop and correct yourself when you are onstage." Garrick Olson - Practises from the pieces. Stopped playing scales and arpeggios when he was twelve. For starters...

When Richter came to Cluj-Napoca in the early 80s (a town in Romania) he stood up until around 2 a.m. practicing around 3-4 hours on two measures. The students who were allowed to watch him practice fell asleep The Bitus.

A Short Essay on the Life of a Pianist After a recent post, I received a request in the form of a comment from a reader, suggesting I might expand on my last paragraph. The last paragraph was as follows: I wonder how many people embark on serious piano studies because they want to be performers or because they are passionate about music, about the piano and about playing the piano? Public performance is quite a different thing, it’s not for the thinskinned or the faint-hearted. The act of performance is an art in itself, distinct from one’s abilities as a musician or as a pianist. It is like any sort of performance art, be it acting, dancing, or walking the tightrope. Actually, walking the tightrope is an analogy I often use for performing solo piano works from memory in public. The only safety nets are the ones we build in during our practising, and I reckon I spend a huge amount of time and energy in my own practice securing the memory. This is basically the equivalent of spending a fortune on insurance policies you hope you never need to use. In his later years, the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter gave up playing from memory and brought his scores, along with a trusted page turner on to the platform with him. He even eschewed the limelight, preferring a muted lamp by the side of the piano. In interviews, he said the time spent memorising or maintaining the memory was no longer worth it, and that he could learn a multitude of new pieces in the time it would have taken him to attend to his memory. There are those, it seems, who were born to play the piano in public, and I don’t need to go into a list of the greats (past and present) who fulfilled their destinies in this regard. The people who are on the top rung of this particular ladder would need to find playing the instrument, learning and memorising new repertoire and maintaining old repertoire relatively effortless (but not necessarily without a considerable investment of time, like any job). They would also need to be adrenaline junkies to some extent, and to be able to handle travel and spending chunks of time alone. Are the great solo pianists born, and not made? Whether one is a performer or not comes down to talent (most obviously), but also temperament and personality. The secret of performance is to be able to get out of one’s own way, and to free up the mind so it is not beset by doubts and insecurities (and therefore tensions) during the process of performing. The performer becomes one with the music, one with the instrument. We all know that a memory slip can cause panic. Errors lead to terrors and then to possible paralysis. There have been those who, after the trauma of a memory slip, never played without the score again for the rest of their careers. For others, a memory slip or momentary lapse in concentration can lead to such acute insecurity that another slip ensues, until it is virtually impossible to carry on. It’s all in the mind! Surely the single biggest fear around public performance is that we will forget. It is perfectly possible to be an amazing pianist without being an amazing musician, and to be a

great musician and yet have quite average skills at an instrument. I recall the apocryphal story of the debut of Adele Marcus, one of the most significant and brilliant teachers of piano of the second half of the last century. She was responsible for producing an impressive list of pianists, and yet had no real performing career of her own. It is said that at her debut with the Schumann concerto, so nervous was she that she vomited on the keyboard and left the stage, never to return. This did not mean she was not a PHENOMENAL pianist, able to play with ease the most fiendish pieces in the piano repertoire and to toss off scales in double notes at the drop of a hat. It meant that her vocation was as a teacher of the piano, not a performer. Think of one of the other great teachers of the era, Maria Curcio – not known as a performing pianist, at all. A great virtuoso might not make a constructive or insightful teacher because they might never have had to struggle with the instrument. Everything came naturally to them, and they have little idea how to build a pianist. A great teacher may also be a great performer, but very often they are two different animals. When I look at the students who have gone through my hands over the years, I have had the gamut. Do I look at the small handful who are now making careers as concert pianists as being better than, or more successful than others who have thriving piano teaching studios or those who decided to pursue more general musical careers, or those who played for a time and then stopped? No, not at all! The elderly person who wants to keep up their piano playing because it brings them joy and keeps their mind active, the lawyer who can’t live without Beethoven sonatas even though he has very limited time to practise – these are just as valid (no more or less so) in the grand (no pun intended) scheme of things than the talented child who absorbs music like a sponge or the tertiary level students about to play their practical exams. Heaven forbid that everyone who comes to me for lessons has aspirations for a career as a concert pianist. Imagine a world overtaken by concert pianists! What a nightmare thought! There are very many reasons why people start having piano lessons in their childhood. Those who are destined to be pianists will usually (although not always) take to it like a duck to water and race ahead. For those others, many find solace in the act of playing, a channel for self expression, an appreciation of the music, and the deep satisfaction of mastering an instrument. For myself, it was a burning passion to play the piano that, for various reasons, had to wait a bit. I think I was just as smitten with music itself as I was with the piano, and perhaps my yearning to play had its roots in the need (yes, need) to express music through my fingers. Embarking on tertiary level piano studies at the RCM was in many ways an irrational decision, based on an overriding passion for the subject (not necessarily for performance, though – this came later as a necessary evil). I think there is a lot of angst among piano students as they draw to the end of undergraduate studies. Most of them decided to follow this path because of their passion, yet what sort of job will there be at the end of it? Should I be a performer or a teacher, or a bit of both? How will I support a family, or even pay the rent? This crisis of identity is common, and there are big decisions to be made. As for the “performer” dilemma, it doesn’t matter how much you may enjoy doing it and feel like this is the life for you, if you haven’t excelled in exams and college competitions by your final year, you need to see this as some sort of barometer for how you will stack up against the fierce competition in the professional world. Remember – nobody thinking of booking Vladimir Horowitz ever asked his agent if he had a doctorate… Unless you love the idea of teaching piano, then the realities of this path may not always be glamorous. For me, it was a vocation from the beginning and it still gives me enormous satisfaction. Yet we don’t need to be so cut-and-dried about things – a portfolio career is absolutely the way of the future for conservatory graduates, and modern institutions are preparing their students for this (along with business management and other tools I wish I had learned back then). Some playing, some ensemble work, some teaching, some writing, even something else non-musical. Why not? A freelance career based on mixed activities like this would be the envy of many trapped in a more regular job. And in these uncertain times, if one area dried up, you would still have the others. The point I am slowly coming to is that everyone can find their niche in the wider world of the

piano. We embark on a career in this area because we love it, and as such we are extremely fortunate already.

Practising on Tour I have been away for the past three weeks on a concert and teaching tour of Singapore and Australia, the focus of my work there was three performances of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I thought it might be of interest – and hopefully of use – to talk about how I prepared this magnum opus for performance having not played it at all in about a decade, and how I approached the practice time I had while on the tour itself. Quite early on in the life of this blog I devoted a whole post to how I set about learning the Goldberg Variations in the first place, very much an obsession and a labour of love. Sometime last year, I was engaged by the Kawai Series at the Queensland Conservatorium in Brisbane to play the Goldberg this Easter; a piece eminently suitable in its grandeur and magnificence for such a Festival (especially given Bach’s own strong religious views). I played the Shigeru Kawai, the model EX concert grand, and wonderful it was too! From this engagement, I was also invited to play at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music in Singapore, and on the Team of Pianists’ series in Melbourne. In addition to my performances, I gave masterclasses and taught a fair number of individual lessons as well as giving a lecture for the Piano Pedagogy programme at the Queensland Con. I thoroughly enjoyed all of these experiences. I started to resurrect the Goldberg Variations just before Christmas, figuring that I would need four months to get the piece back into my fingers and into my head. This would also allow enough time for what I can only describe as the Olympian training component – regular play-throughs as part of my practice routine as well as in front of others. I can’t overemphasise the importance of developing the physical and mental stamina in this way: deciding when I would commit to a comewhat-may performance in my practice room with absolutely no stopping, going over troublespots or otherwise tinkering with the process I call “practising a performance”. While I would not presume to include myself in such august company as Sviatoslav Richter, even he needed the ears of a few select colleagues before he would take his work from the practice room to the stage, and before my one house concert and two lunchtime recitals in London before I set sail, I did feel the need to play for two colleagues I completely trust. It is absolutely part of the process. Before I was ready to do this, though, I needed to start back at square one, and I began with the nine canons that form the backbone of the piece. Having learned the work very thoroughly initially, and also having performed it at least 20 or so times (I never counted them up!), it did not take long at all before I had the notes back in my fingers and in my memory. Mind you, I was careful to go through each line of the counterpoint again, as though I were learning the piece from scratch. In order to make sure each line was known independently of muscular memory, I played it from memory with

one finger. I also played all combinations of two voices with one finger, or (for variety) in double octaves. From there, I added the rest of the variations almost on whimsy, starting with the ones I felt would need the most work. Before too long, I had the piece back in my fingers but what I would describe as deliberately plain and bland. I soon noticed that, if each variation could be described as a character in a play, their old costumes were tired and they needed a makeover. I found as soon as I recharacterised one variation, the next one was affected so I found I was recreating the piece in my imagination, my conception had changed and grown over time. Because I have changed, so has the way I approach this music. Between the Singapore performance and the Brisbane one, I had a few days to practise as many hours as I wanted with very few other distractions. It was during this period that I noticed a small handful of the variations really wanting to assume different characters, and this felt absolutely right. So I went with this and made a few significant changes to how I was going to shape chunks of the work. Because the pedal of the Brisbane Shigeru was impeccably regulated, I was able to create pedal effects that (although I do say so myself) were quite beautiful. Let me interject here that I absolutely use pedal in Bach playing, very discreetly and in a very considered way. I use the right pedal for resonance and colour (piano sound without the pedal is, after a while, horribly boring) and the left pedal as a registration. There are two variations where, on this piano, I decided to keep the left pedal down all the way, not because I wanted it softer but because I wanted the silver quality that the shift pedal offers when it is regulated well. I would add that there were many variations which did not need any pedal whatever, and I rested my feet on the ground during these. Between the performances of the tour, I absolutely practised daily, from between three to five hours. It was important to me to go through the whole work slowly every day. I hardly ever needed to look at the score – my maxim all along has been to have the score AWAY from the piano and not to do my memorising with the score on the desk. This way, I could develop the proper reflexes from the beginning. It is hard at first, but it gets much easier – with practice! One thing I found myself doing daily was to practise the canons and other variations that are strictly linear by bringing out a selected voice forte while keeping the others pianissimo. Thus, in the canons I practised each repeat three times so that each voice had its moment in the limelight. This enabled me, in performance, to shape the individual lines with extreme control, and to vary the voicing and layering on the repeats. For some reason, I have added five minutes playing time to my performance, which now runs one hour and twenty five minutes without interval! Sorry! This brings me to the thorny question of what one does on the day of the concert itself, and here I can give no formula because we are all different. I have spoken to many colleagues about this and everybody has their own set of rituals that work for them. For myself, if you’re interested, I avoid caffeine and sugar. I like to go through my programme slowly and calmly in the morning then eat a good meal with some protein. Sweet potatoes are supposed to be a very good thing as they release their energy slowly. By the middle of the afternoon, I am usually starting to feel the anxiety that most performers feel on concert day. It may surprise you to know that many of the world’s bestloved and most successful musicians and actors suffer from stage fright. My experiences have been that I am fine as soon as I walk out onto the stage but the feelings of anxiety and nausea from mid afternoon to the time in the green room just before you have to play are pure torture. I can’t eat anything before I play, for fear that it might end up on the stage. A final word about performing – I wonder how many people embark on serious piano studies because they want to be performers or because they are passionate about music, about the piano and about playing the piano? Public performance is quite a different thing, it’s not for the thin-skinned or the faint-hearted.

Painting the Forth Bridge: Learning the Goldberg Variations My first experience with this incredible work of art was hearing Andras Schiff play it at Dartington, as the preface to his inspiring week of teaching in the summer of 1982 – masterclasses that remain as vivid as yesterday. Eighty minutes of music and a peerless performance that touched every part of me, so that when I left the Great Hall, the trees and the lawn were different, everything had changed. This experience had quite literally changed my life. The Sirens were calling immediately, and I knew I had to learn and to play this magnum opus, so when the week of classes was over, I duly began. But postgraduate studies in the USA were imminent, and it would be twelve years before I would first dare play the piece. I would like to describe the labour pains that I went through before my first performance in Chichester Cathedral. Since then I have played the work many times over the course of over a decade, on four different continents, and I am booked to play it again next year in Singapore and Australia. Having returned from my postgraduate years in New York in 1990, I settled into a life in London where I was teaching specialist young pianists at the Purcell School three days a week, teaching also at St. Paul’s Girls’ School and the Centre for Young Musicians, a fair amount of private work and playing a LOT of chamber music and other professional engagements in London, Europe and the USA. I should add that I commuted to New York once a month for teaching purposes but when I think of it now, I shudder at the prospect. (I made use of the flying time by writing out the Goldberg Variations from memory, a useful task which really showed up gaps in my understanding of it.) So how was I to fulfill my yearning to learn and present this great work, which had turned into an all-consuming passion? I would get home from my day at the Purcell School about 6 or 7 pm, pretty exhausted from giving my all to the young pianists in my charge, knowing that I had to repeat the process the day after. The very last thing I wanted to do was to sit at the piano and practise for two hours, but I forced myself to do just that. It was necessary. I had virtually no creative juices left, at the end of such a day, so I resorted to a sort of mechanical practising, knowing I had to produce the goods somehow. HOLD IT! Mechanical practising? This is such a dirty word! We are supposed to live by the muse, to shun anything that smacks of fingerwork or routine, or autopilot, but frankly, I was already running on empty. So, I developed a strategy which I neither advocate to my students, nor do I forbid it. It was born of necessity and when all is said and done, it worked. In an ideal world we would approach the keyboard for our daily work filled with creative energy, our fingers ready to realise our innermost visions of the music without recourse to mechanics. This is what teachers espouse but frankly I don’t believe it is always possible. Most teachers don’t actually get up and play, so this can end up as idealised teacher babble. Let those who have scaled Mount Parnassus tell how it is done… A memorised performance of anything that lasts eighty minutes without a break involves building into the practising as many safety features as possible. I had to be as certain as I could that I would be able to walk onto a concert platform and play the piece with as much security as is humanly possible. I couldn’t just hope it would go OK. So, I always practised from memory. The Goldberg Variations comprises 30 variations, each in two symmetrical halves. Subdividing these variations,

we uncover canons at ever-increasing intervals every third variation, and these form the backbone of the work. (Variation 3 is a canon at the unison, Variation 6 a canon at the second, and so on). Each variation of the Goldbergs is either in strict linear counterpoint, or is strongly contrapuntal. My first safety feature was to unravel the music and work on the lines (or voices) independently. I decided to get to know, intimately, each line by itself first of all. This I could do while tired, since it was either right or wrong. I would take a variation, divide it into four subsections (an 8-bar unit) and analyse each voice in turn. By analyse, I mean quick and dirty at the keyboard, in whatever way made sense to me at the time. This does not have to be Schenkerian, it can simply be what you see and what you notice by way of design on any given day. I would take this line and test my understanding of the geography – its inner meanderings – by playing it with one finger, or with the other hand, or by deciding to take the black notes with one hand and the white notes with the other, or by playing every other note with the other hand. In other words, I was deliberately trying to cement the structure of the line and how it sounded into my brain without muscle memory, which (as I have long appreciated) is a false friend – easy come, but very easy go under the pressures of a performance. Once I was able to play, from memory, 8 bars with each voice in turn with one finger (sometimes I played it in octaves or even double octaves, which achieves the same result), I put two voices together, painfully slowly, again with one finger. Time consuming? Yes, of course, but I wanted to build my house on rock and not on sand. Fortunately, most of the writing is in two or three voices so the stepladder approach was:       

soprano tenor bass soprano and tenor soprano and bass tenor and bass soprano, tenor and bass (clearly by this stage I had worked out my fingerings)

Even when I had learned the whole piece and was practising complete run-throughs, I still went back to this process regularly, and I will absolutely do so again before next year. Each time I do this, I get to know the music better. If you have a contrapuntal piece in four voices (SATB), this is how the process looks:              

S A T B SA ST SB AT AB TB SAT SAB STB SATB

I have even heard it suggested that you can play three voices and sing the fourth. Try it out and see if it helps. Personally, I can’t do it.

For added control and to hear how each voice fitted into its surroundings, I also practised playing all the voices together but playing a selected voice forte and the other(s) pianissimo. This is like shining a laser beam onto that voice. Another version of this type of work is to play one voice but dummy the others. Send the keys down a fraction of a squilimeter, aiming not to sound them at all – incredible for motor control and coordination. (This is very hard at first, but you do get better at it.) I would work through both these processes for a 4-bar section before moving onto the next 4-bar section. The work was very thorough, very painstaking and yet (I would stress this) very permanent! A further safety feature I chose to build in was practising transposition. It seems incredible to me, as well as unrealistic, to read in Cortot’s edition of Chopin’s Etude op 10 no 1: It will prove excellent practice when once the Study is thoroughly perfected, to play it slowly, transposing it in every key while keeping the fingerings of key C. [Cortot, Alfred. Frédéric Chopin. 12 Études, op.10. Édition de travail des oeuvres de Chopin. Paris: Éditions Salabert, 1915.] (As an upstart student, I added the word “really?” to my score.) While I did aim to keep the fingerings of (in this case) the key of G, I certainly did not feel it was necessary to transpose into every key (in the immortal words of Stan Laurel: “Life isn’t short enough”). So, again from memory, I chose three or four keys and spent a bit of time playing sections of the music very slowly in these keys. This is a brilliant test of memory and is in itself one of the best forms of ear and brain training. I found this very challenging, but it repaid the effort. My advice to students is to take those passages of their pieces they are having memory trouble with (it might only be here and there) and to do the transposition practice very slowly in two other keys. I like one key to be a semitone away in either direction, and the other to be on the opposite side of the circle of fifths (thus pieces in G major get transposed to G flat or A flat major, plus D flat major).

Another way of practising variations is to take a phrase from the theme and play just that phrase in each variation in turn. It is quite a neat way of seeing how the composer develops it, and it is a great memory strengthener. If you play bars 1 – 8 (which in the Goldberg Aria is the first big cadence in the tonic key), you can then play the variations of only these eight bars for the whole work! This means the next section will be from bars 9 – 16 and you will have to start from there in each variation, with no reference to the bars that have gone before. I hope you are seeing the benefit of this. It is always good to be able to start from different places in your piece, and not always from obvious places like phrase beginnings. (Remember the game Pin The Tail On The Donkey? Close your eyes, place your index finger anywhere on the page and start from there, even if it half way through a bar.)