True music making!

Celllist Jacqueline du Pre shows how to make music in this short clip: at first she is playing Mozart politely on the piano, and chatting with her husband Daniel Barenboim, but you can start watching around 1:05 when the room practically catches fire as she switches to her cello and plays Brahms.

What a natural relationship with her instrument, while her heart shines through and connects with the audience. The re-creative art was alive and well with her during her all too brief career.

I remember her in London in the late 1980s visiting (haunting?) the Royal College of Music, in her wheel-chair, crippled by multiple sclerosis, when speech was a problem, attending concerts and after concert parties, breaking our hearts...

Great singer!

Intriguing video with director Almodovar. Brazilian Caetano Veloso  is a political activist and top calibre singer... a rare combination! He's won two Grammy awards. Born in 1942, still going strong, power to his elbow!

Amazing amazing dancers!

Gob smacking dance!

congratulations

Congratulations to my pupils Abhinav Tiwari who obtained 90 marks out of 100 and won first prize with Honours (highest category) in his class at Southampton Festival of Music, performing Faure Barcarolle number 1. To Mike Huang for winning first prize in his class at the same festival performing a recital of Brahms G minor Rhapsody, Cyril Scott Lotus Land and the rather tricky Poulenc Toccata - well done!  Maya Garside performed the last movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata with characteristic fire, and Emmy Huang gave a well practised recital of Haydn, Granados and Sinding (Rustle of Spring), but both were beaten to the prizes by performers several years older than themselves. Keep practising everyone! Slowly!

How to play the piano properly

It's easy to say, and very hard to do...

To honour the expressive power of the music, playing from inside one's imagination, where the freedom of the arm and hand follow the inflections of the music. Sitting vertically, head upright, with the forearms horizontal and wrists not higher than the knuckles, fingertips in close contact with the keys.

Click here to watch a video of Finnish pianist Laura Mikkola showing perfectly how to do it, brava!

Or here to listen to one of my distinguished teachers Albert Ferber playing beautiful Faure (comme il faut).

Diploma

Pleased to have passed my FRSM exam. That was a lot of work!

congratulations!

Congratulations to my pupil Abhinav Tiwari for winning First place in the Rotary Young Musicians Competition in Winchester this week. Chopin Fantaisie-Impromptu is a tricky piece!
Through to the next round. Keep up the good work!

The modern art world

taken from a very good article "Beyond the Froth and Jargon" in the FT by their art critic Jackie Wullschlager 24/11/12.

"The expansion of the artworld in the 1960s... rightly challenged the old elites... What could not have been predicted, however, was that within a generation of critical theory hijacking academe, a revolution in humanities teaching - employing semiotics, structuralism, the idea that culture and society form a system of self-referential signs and symbols - would empower a conceptual art that depends on curators and advisers to explain it. As this became a professional business, the chatter of deconstruction -lite morphed into a self-contained deliberately obfuscating gallery-speak that Robert Hughes already noted in 1989, "extorts assent as the price of entry" and urges a critical vacuum. "If all signs are autonomous and refer only to one another, it must seem to follow that no image is truer or deeper than the next, and that the artist is absolved from his or her struggle for authenticity", the late art critic wrote. ..

But the reign of theory is not inevitable. The best response is what Cyril Connolly called "the resonance of seclusion". Hundreds of artists still battle alone in studios to make authentic work that does not need a curator to explain it  (...Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin...) There is a new hunger for work that engages with lived reality... Every age has to cut through its own academicism - salon pictures in the 19th century, theory and money today - to get to art that is original and matters: a challenge but also a pleasure.

Best YouTube piano videos clips part 1

Listening homework for my advanced piano pupils, Abhinav, Mike, Emmy, Maya

 Please set aside minimum 10-15 minutes per week to listen to great pianists.

Gradually you will get to know your favourite composers and performers, and so then you can explore them more. 
Please notice
+ horizontal forearm and flattish fingertips.
+ freedom of upper arm and forearm, while fingers stay close to keys.
+ upper arm and back muscles used when playing loudly (sitting not crouched over, not hunched)
+ Very intense concentration
+ very intense emotional expression

The Greatest Piano video of all time
Josef Hofmann plays Rachmaninov
Rounded movements. Beautiful hands. Inside the music.

Daniil Trifonov chopin scherzo 4
(slightly distracting facial expressions?!) Try and get tickets to see him sometime
in London in 2013. Possibly best young pianist alive (apart from my pupils!)

Ivo Pogorelich Chopin sonata 2 movt 1
If only I could copy his hairstyle! One of the most original pianists alive.

Gilels plays Rachmaninoff
Long pedals. Jumps around very fast and accurately!

Horowitz chopin ballade 1
Perhaps the greatest pianist of 20th century.
He makes you listen very carefully. Great concentration.
Unusually flat hands, much less curvy then almost everyone else! Expressive fingertips.

Mike and Abhinav

Zimerman Pathetique sonata Beethoven

Best YouTube clips part 2

Richter plays Schumann at 24.11 into this one.
Notice how loudly he plays his 5th finger - and often held very straight for repeated chords.
Fingers inside the keys despite huge arm flexibility.


Martha Argerich makes it look so easy! She is beautiful even in black and white!

Rubinstein plays Liszt Liebestraum

warm hearted, warm cantabile singing tone. best posture keeping head up!

Quite funny comedy sketch at the piano Victor Borge


such intelligent hands, perfect hand positions,
Jean Yves Thibaudet, at just before 2 minutes into this video (or 5.42 - 6.00)

perfect arm freedom
Alicia de Larrocha recital


Arcadi Volodos plays his own arrangement of Mozart’s Turkish March
Mr Rubber Fingers certainly knows his way round the keyboard!
Slightly annoying video editing at the beginning.

Congratulations!

Congratulations to my piano pupil Abhinav Tiwari from Southampton! Abhinav passed Grade 8 with Merit this term, having only ever taken one other grade exam.

Should we play the piano strictly in time?

 

Liszt 'Au bord d'une source' played by Eugen d'Albert

Should we play the piano strictly in time? Not according to contemporaries of Beethoven and Liszt. This is what von Bulow writes. He was a concert pianist celebrated in USA and Europe; married to Liszt' s daughter, was considered one of the leading piano pupils of Liszt.

"The time (tempo) should not be a tyrannically restraining or driving mill-hammer, but should be to the musical composition what pulsation is to human life. There is no slow  tempo in which places do not occur requiring a more rapid movement, in order to avoid the feeling of dragging, just as there is no presto that does not, on the contrary, demand in many places a quiet delivery, in order not to take away, through over-haste, the means of expression. Both however, the accelerando as well as the ritardando, must never give the impression of being pushed, jerked or forced: it must always only be employed by the periods and phrases". [from Bulow's influential edition of  Beethoven Piano Sonata Op 110, movement 1.]

On a slightly different tack, William Blake writes: "Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius".  (Proverb of Hell).  

Why has so much piano playing become boring lately? Because students are trained to pass their exams and win competitions, which is different from playing the piano in order to express what the composer wants to express.  In order to pass an exam you can play correctly: in order to express deep emotions, you have to abandon yourself, to some extent, to the emotion, which results in slight distortions of pulse - playing 'between the notes'. 

Please enjoy listening to the fluid, flexible, outpouring of watery notes performed by another pupil of Liszt, d'Albert who shows us how to play the piano. If you as the listener are not breathing more deeply by the end of the performance, please ring your doctor!