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Casinitaly and monkeeys -- thanks for the best wishes. Looking forward to reporting in! Just need to put together a recording before the recital deadline

I had a great lesson yesterday. For once, all of my pieces went very well. My AOTW was playing my Beethoven Sonata (F minor op. 2 no. 1) much faster and pretty fluently. It is about final tempo now. That piece has really tested me over the last few months, and it came off quite well. So, all three of my ABRSM exam pieces are at an acceptable level - six months in advance! So, of course, I am going to learn an another alternate. All three of the pieces that I had chosen are fast, and technically challenging. I decided my final piece should be something calmer as a contrast. So, I am learning Brahms Intermezzo in A minor as an alternate C piece. I love this piece, and I do best with romantic music, so it should be a good piece to end on. With that, I have an A piece I am confident of, two learned Beethoven sonata movements to choose from, and two C pieces to choose from. So I am feeling more confident about a fall grade 8!

That is quite an accomplishment SwissMS. That kind of dedication is truly inspiring. Great job.

That really is an accomplishment! You are going to knock it out of the park!

It's our ATOW thread's birthday - 8 years today!


It's been a wonderful little nook to meet with so many of you and a real joy to read about everyone's progress.


It's the place I always feel I can come to post and I feel that I've made some truly wonderful friends as we've journeyed together these past few years. Some of these folks I've also had the great pleasure of meeting in person.

We've got the most replies of any thread in the ABF, which really tells you how much we want and need to share our baby-steps! - We're second in views only to the Chopin thread, but hey, he's in a category all by himself, isn't he?

Looking forward to another great year with all of you!

Happy Birthday AOTW!! This has been a great thread for letting us recognize that we all enjoy our piano journey. We celebrate the victories, and commiserate over the bumps in the road. I too have met some wonderful people in this thread!

Casinitaly, little did you know when you started this thread what kind of 'legs' it would have!

AOTW reflects what we go through when learning to play the piano--plenty of setbacks and flashes of discouragement, but then the glorious moments when something works and maybe we do a little fist-pump and say, "Yes!"

Well I'm so glad I joined the party! Happy Birthday everyone.
My week was amazing. starting with a low because we were going to Calgary and I'm miss my lesson. Getting back Friday and having to struggle out again to the last of the season concert with our local Okanagan Symphony with the Griffon Trio playing Ludwig van Beethoven, Triple Concerto, Op. 56 in C Major. Too much effort, really, but - What a delight! and at the After Party meeting Jammie Parker, and lots of other wonderful people, only to realize I was his 'Grand Student' How's that you might wonder. Well he was my teacher's teacher... ! What a strange connection but very exciting to realize, and very very humbling!
Went to a master class he was holding the next day and again very humbled by the talent those young people exhibited.... just a young girl playing Chopin Concerto no 2....unbelievable. I'm off to open a bottle of something nice - Retirement is peachy right now!

Passing my first exams today is my big achievement this week!

It is inspiring to read you too!

Bravo! That is quite an AOTW 😊

Jouishy - Congratulation on passing your exam! that is quite an achievement!

Happy 8 years to all you AOTWers!! Time sure flies when you're having this much fun.

And congrats on all your accomplishments, big and small.

Jim

There's no comparison to the Chopinistas. I've looked at that thread, and, there's hardly any achievements at all! So depressing. Here, achievement is all we do!

Happy birthday to us! This is such a fab thread!

Well done Jouishy, great achievement on your exam result.
SwissMS, you are a model and an inspiration and you deserve to sail through your Grade 8!

My AOTW is just something small. It's the kind of week month where I have to think hard to identify the achievements - my focus is elsewhere and my piano is not getting a lot of my energy and attention! That said, I am working on a piece that I started years ago after leaving school and finishing lessons. I did not have the useful self learning tips I have picked up on this board back then, and there is so much about how I approached learning that piece that was terrible!
I devised some really awful fingering for one small section, which has stuck with me over the years and has led me to trip up in this spot every time. This week, I changed the fingering. It's not perfectly ingrained yet - if I'm not concentrating.,my fingers can still find themselves playing the old pattern. But it's much better and at a time when progress is very slow it's great to be able to look at this small section and feel that a problem has been tackled!

That’s a great achievement to report, Barbaram! I think all of our progress is made up of these seemingly tiny moments of concentrated attention.

My achievement of the week is NOT over-enthusiastically agreeing to “adopt” ($$) a 55-year-old baby grand that I don’t really have room for. The thought of having a real acoustic piano at home, and the lightness and joy the first time I tried playing it, gave me the bug... When I bought my Yamaha N1 last year, I didn’t really know what I was looking for, listening for, or feeling for—I based my decision in significant part on the opinions of others. It makes sense for me, where I live, and it’s a great digital piano. But something in me wants the complexity of a REAL piano!
Luckily, before I committed to rearranging my home and bank account to accommodate my friend’s daughter’s uncle’s baby grand piano, I got some good advice from Ed McMorrow and others. And then I braved my stage fright by trying out some pianos at a couple of the local dealers. There are other paths to pianistic nirvana: acoustic upright with a silent system, perhaps? I can enjoy the process of piano-hunting, and a year or more on the journey sounds like fun!

Love it! Reminds me of my personal motto from my running/biking days: every step/mile a new personal record! There is always something to celebrate: wettest ride, shortest run, biggest mood-improvement....

SwissMS that sounds like a whole fistfull of achievements! Way to go!

My achievement of the week is the realization that I've actually gotten a bit better since I had stopped lessons around 9 years ago. I picked out a piece that I had hoped could be my ABF recital piece. Despite not getting it good enough for the recital, I was pleasantly surprised at how well and how quickly I was able to sight read it. My note recognition was noticeably better than before, and my hands just seemed to know appropriate fingering and automatically go to the right places.

I was excited enough to submit a piece to the 50th ABF recital after receiving a PM advertising it. It's been a while since the previous time.