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Hi Ed and MaryAnn, welcome to this forum and to this topic!

Lisz85, that sounds like a good tip! I'm gonna try that. Thanks!

Not much of AOTW here... just another week of hard practise.

Welcome to the forum, MaryAnne. I haven't been here long myself, but it seems like a very friendly group and I have learned tons from this forum.

FarmGirl, I know what you mean about needing to get out of the house after a while. My husband and I retired here 1 1/2 year ago. His hobby is writing open source software, and mine is playing piano. We both walk around inside our heads half the time, so we have to get out of the house daily or go nuts!

Liszt85, I would also like to see a video of arm position. I just pray a lot when I have a big jump, or even a medium jump.

Cathy, I am glad you understand my feeling. Now I feel so much better after going to the office. I talked with a couple o fpeople and went out to a "light" lunch. I also had a lesson:)

Here's my atow for music:
1) Started the 3rd movement of Pathetique. Actually, I'm glad completing all three of them now. My teacher suddenly changed her teaching style with me. She assigned me half of the movement (4 pages)today with a few advices. She said I could add the trills from the get-go and bring it ready to play through for her in the lesson next week. She told me that she would like to see how I put it together, especially around the area that involves immitation. I was feeling like, "gee, did i make progress or what? She trusts me . Of course, she may tell me next week "Vwwwaaaat is this?". Or it could be the easiest 4 pages. Its ok. I am happy right now.
2) My teacher and I decided on the Bach piece - English Suite Number 2. We will start this from next week. Use Henle urtext for this. I am soooo looking forward to playing Bach again
3) I lost 1 pound out of the 5 pounds I gained while playing Beethoven. Beethoven's sonata makes me hungry. I now devised a new routine. I ride my stational bike for 40 min with a CD. I also changed my diet. We eat brown rice and I stopped drinking a glass of wine at night. My goal is to lose 4 more pounds. I really hated seeing my porky self in the ZOOM screen.

Videos posted in a new thread. Check it out.

+1 another kindred spirit.

List 85
I love the waltz. It's gorgeous. With respect to arm pit, I had the same advice from my current teacher in my first lesson. My problem in those days were relating to tenseness. Not sure if it has anything to do with your experience...

I had a long break in piano playing. I was always nervus and incredibly tense. My first teacher often pointed it out to me "relax, you are tensing up again". But it created the opposite effect. My current teacher observed the way I was playing and told me that my elbows were sticking out like this (gesture) and it's really hard to play that way. She told me to tuck my elbows in and try to play a passage as softly as I could. So I did. Lo and behold, my tension was gone. That's my elbow story.

Wow, so many posts to catch up on.

Congratulations to Little Blue Engine and SwissMS for your first recital submissions. I listened to both and they were excellent. Also congrats to all the other AOTWers that sumbitted - Farmgirl, Cas, MaryBee, Andy, Teo, (I know I've missed some others, sorry). You all sounded great to me.

Ed - Welcome to the thread - Hey, I thought I had the exclusive franchise on playing piano in the shower! I know it greatly improves my singing, so it can't hurt to play piano in there too. Don't worry too much about speed at this point, go for accuracy and musicality first. The speed will come in due course.

MaryAnn - Welcome as well. It sounds like you are making fast progress to be starting your first Bach piece so soon. It is fun to play the melody of pieces we can't quite bring off right now. Think of those little RH tryouts as appetizers to whet the appetite for a full go of it some time in the future. Fun!

Liszt85 - I don't remember if you've posted in the AOTW before, but welcome if you haven't. We're always glad to have accomplished players like yourself contribute here. Your video on the leaps was instructive. Where was the masterclass held? Was the teacher someone we might have heard of?

I guess my AOTW was finishing off both Handel's Sarabande and Variations and Scarlatti's (Alessandro) Arioso. The MacDowell piece won't go so quickly. Magrath's lists it as a grade 7-8 so I'm guessing a couple months. I've already run into two places where it has 10ths that I can't reach - this should be very challenging. Mrs F. gave me a thumbs up this morning on Bewitched, Bothered, which felt really good. I'll try and get a recording for the piano bar this weekend. Rainbow and the Christmas Song are coming along. SOW is B-flat minor, one of my favorite tonalities.

Hi JimF, I haven't posted here before. I'm a migrant from pianist corner. The masterclass was held at a local music school. You probably haven't heard of him but his name is Hector Garcia. I don't know much about him.. but he is a good teacher. I also think he has a career in something other than music (law? business?), so he was out of practice. He played well in spite of that. Here's a video of the masterclass: http://youtu.be/VaaeZ9S_h2Y It was a very informal setting (as you probably can see in the video).

Monday I found Edvard Grieg's Bell Ringing played by Eva Nordahl almost by accident when toying around a bit with Spotify, and I loved it. And I took it up, and now at the end of the week, I can play it with much of the expression. I feel I really achieved something there.

Thanks for the video, Liszt85. It was very interesting. Too bad it had to cut out just when it did as I was engrossed in his pedaling discussion. Nice playing.

My brother and I got together the other evening for our first joint practice session of our violin/piano duet, "Danny Boy". Neither of us had played with someone else before, and we were both quite embarrassed about our playing. Even still, it was kind of thrilling to play with someone else. And after a few run-throughs, we were sounding a bit better, and we identified some homework that each of us needs to work on. Next session in a week...

I'm at a frustrating point with my Beethoven (Pathetique). It's at the musicality/interpretation phase now, and I'm a little stuck. I need to get on Spotify this weekend, listen to some performances of this, and try to understand what makes them work.

MaryBee, that's wonderful you have a musical brother. I have a younger brother in Japan who used to play the piano much better than me We used to do duet a lot. It was seriously fun although sometimes we wound up fighting. He played the guitar too. He is an artist now (painter) and no longer interested in playing the piano. I love duet and miss it very much.

Good luck on the 2nd movement of Pathetique. Everyone plays slightly differently. I had my own preference but I could not quite manage playing the way I wanted it to sound. In the ABF recital submission, I made so much mistakes that I hated myself for 5 seconds. But, then I thought, hey, I should take this like a reflection of the current skill limitation, forgive myself and move on. It's so easy to forgive myself . I am looking forward to hearing your interpretation.. maybe in the next recital?

That is so awesome to get to play with a sibling! I used to love to sing with my sister--our voices matched so well.

MaryA

Quick update. I just got an email from my teacher saying that the high schooler has some problem and won't be able to play Sunday. So, no comparison of movement #2. She wants me to play movement #1 too if I like ... I haven't practiced it at all since I recorded it for the ABF rectial so hopefully it hasn't slipped from my fingers!

Oh, and apparently, this adult recital doesn't get us out of the "real" one with the whole studio so I guess I'll get to play again next month.

Andy, that's cool. The more the better. It's so nice your teacher has adults recital:)

I always have to go to kiddie recital and have to play in the end... I begged my teacher to get me out of the picture taken... It's just so wierd to have this old lady stiicking out among the kiddies from 5 years old.. My teacher has at least 7 adults but they are all shy - none wants to play in the kiddie's recital except me.

I'm a bit jealouse reading about the duets with violin or cello players. I wish I had a music mate too..... sigh. The violin and cello make such a wonderful full and warm sound. I played the violin and cello for a short period, but it was wiser to keep it by one instrument, the piano, because of lack of time and money. I miss the sound very much.

Svendsen, welcome to this topic! The ringing bell of Edvard Grieg is a bit odd, but very nice. He could be an architect too: the house he build is really beautiful. I would swap my apartment for that house anytime.




Here are my pieces:

Granados - Spanish dance - Oriental. I put this piece aside. I heard it too many times. It's almost finished, but I need to rest it.

Für Elise - I can play the whole piece, but the difficult sections not at a proper speed yet. Need some work at pedalling.

Martin - Dark Eyes Boogie - i take chunks of the piece and try to speed them up and feel comfortable with.

Tchaikovsky - In Church - Finished. Just polishing. Need some better pedalling to let it sound more beautiful.

Tchaikovsky - The Witch - new piece that replaces In Church. This week I learned how to play it HT. But its a fast piece, so I still have a long way to go.


Andy, good luck with playing at the recital sunday!

Good luck with your recital on Sunday, Andy. I hope you have a lot of fun! I admire you for playing a live recital!

My AOTW was recognizing a long standing problem with my hand position and starting to work on it. My teacher is continually saying "get your wrists off the floor, get deeper into the keyboard". I look at her with that "Huh?" look, and play on. So, I videotaped my playing and, oh my gosh, I play at the edge of keys a lot, and my left wrist is hanging down. So, now I know and I can fix it! My pieces are going well. I have learned (slowly) the first two Clementi movements, 3 pages of the Chopin waltz, but only 1/2 page of Bach Prelude 851. This thing looks like a .zip file, and I haven't found the key to unlock it yet.

My AOTW was taking part in my first ABF recital, which has been a lot of fun, despite the server going down when I was midway through listening. There is much to be learned here, and many nice people to meet (that's right, YOU!).

We had our adult "Musicale" / practice for the studio rehearsal this afternoon. It was very low key, just us pianists, discussion about pieces (like with our ABF recitals erring on the positive!) and some wine and way too much desert.

There were only four of us there. One other was a no-show and two had withdrawn recently. I opened with the Clementi Sonatina. The best thing - almost no nerves. I think just having pianists meant that we didn't have to worry so much. The first was OK; I played the second movement about as good as I can - better, in fact, that the ABF recording. The third movement I just took too fast but it was fun, fun.

And I closed with Debussy's Arabesque #1. This is still a little bit of a work in progress (well, it will be for life). Mostly it went pretty well ... just still too many "holes".

There were a nice variety of other pieces played (Chopin Waltz in A Minor, Schubert Impromptu #3 - out of my league!, the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concert K414 (A Major) which my teacher played the orchestral piece for). Our teacher also played us the Mozart Piano Concerto she has been working on - K488 also in A major. That pretty much knocked our socks off!

It was a super fun afternoon!

Yea Andy! That sounds like the Denver piano party we had a couple of months ago. The next one coming up should be like that, too. I love it. And good for you for having fun with your pieces

Cathy