Last May, our studio participated for the first time in Tacoma’s wonderful Orchestral Recital Series, where students are given the opportunity to perform a concerto movement or other arrangement with a full orchestra! Four studio pianists participated playing music by Noona, Vandall, and Mozart. What a fun way to celebrate a lot of hard work and love of music with friends and family! Well done, all!
Tristan takes a bow after a sparkling performance of the finale to Vandall’s Concerto in G:
Noelle poses elegantly at the piano after the concert:
All the performers for the evening, including our own Tristan, Maggie, Noelle, and Mary Boyde. Congratulations!
The Russian-born pianist Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989) is a true legend, and his name is forever synonymous with the consummate piano virtuoso. He electrified his audiences with his stupendous technique and his remarkable ability to draw out the tonal color of the piano. At his best he was without peer, but he was also a nervous performer, and some of his performances are indeed messy. He withdrew from the stage on numerous occasions, though ultimately he enjoyed a twilight performing career into his eighties, when his playing was noted more for color, charm, and finesse than for the incredible bravura of his younger years.
After one of his longest absences from the concert stage, Horowitz made a historic return in 1965 with a monumental recital in Carnegie Hall. The video excerpt above is his performance of two little Scarlatti sonatas that he played as encores at that concert. His emotional intensity, technical ease, and sense of pianistic color, as well as his sheer delight in performing are all apparent. He made this underappreciated music spring to life with grace and color. This particular concert is etched into my musical memory because my sixth grade teacher gave me the recording of this concert and it was one of a handful of treasured vinyl recordings that I had growing up (mind you, this was long before the days of the internet!)
Below a recording of 75-year old Horowitz playing one of his signature pieces–the complex and passionate Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto–with Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra:
Your playing only improves as well as you practice, but what is the best way to practice? Some aspects depend on your particular learning style, but here are a few general guidelines to consider:
Don’t practice your mistakes! Your brain doesn’t know which are the “right” or “wrong” notes in a given piece, it only knows what you train it to do. So focus while you practice and practice slowly (#4 below!) so that you play things correctly much more often than incorrectly. This will help you learn faster. It takes a lot of extra time and effort to unlearn something, then relearn it correctly.
Practice expressively from the beginning. Make the articulation, dynamics and phrasing a part of your mental picture of a piece as soon as possible. Try to identify important moments in a piece (an interesting change of harmony, or the return of a theme, or the arrival of a new theme) and be aware of them as you learn.
Incorporate relaxation moments. Whether the music is easy or difficult, diffuse the tension by finding places and ways to relax your hands. Make these relaxation moments a part of how you learn a piece of music.
Practice slowly. This is a great secret we can all learn from the great pianists. They all practice slowly. Why? With slow practice you can be in control of every technical and musical detail. If you practice well slowly, you will be amazed to find how much easier it becomes to play well in any tempo.
Stagger your work. It’s good practice to work on something for awhile, turn your attention to something else, then come back. This keeps things fresh and helps to solidify what you have learned.
All this matters not at all if you don’t practice, so make your piano practice an enjoyable part of your daily routine. The more you improve, the more likely you are to enjoy playing the piano!
The legendary Argentine pianist Martha Argerich recently celebrated her 75th birthday. A phenomenal natural talent, she won two major international competitions at age 16, then returned at age 24 in 1965 as the gold-medal winner of the Chopin International Competition in Warsaw. Since then, she has never been off the international stage, thrilling audiences with her bravura technique and intuitive, electrifying musicality as a solo and chamber musician.
Enjoy the young, blazing, Martha Argerich performing Chopin’s Scherzo in c# minor, Op 37 (above) and the glorious Prokofiev Third Piano Concerto in C Major Op 26 with Andre Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra (below).
Is there a reason to take the years of time and effort to learn to play a musical instrument, other than the pure pleasure of enjoying music? If you care about brain development, there definitely is!
Making music is a remarkable “whole-brain” activity that incorporates fine muscle control with visual and auditory processing, as well as analytical thinking and emotional involvement. And if you perform, the stakes are even higher, with memory, concentration under pressure, and communication with the audience all being important factors.
Watch the fun video above and see what happens to your brain when you play music!
