Week 3: Starting new pieces

Week 3 was the first active piano practice week of 2018. I feel I got in most of the hours I wanted, aside from Thursday. I also started working on some new material this week; then again, I realize I have not mentioned the liszt of things I'm currently working on so here goes.

• Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata - 1st movement
• Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata - 2nd movement
• Czerny Op. 299 No. 1
• Czerny Op. 299 No. 2
• Liszt - Sancta Dorothea
• Schubert - Moment Musicaux 3
• Schumann - Knecht Ruprecht

As new pieces / studies, I began working on

• Prokofiev - Tarantelle
• Czerny Op. 299 No. 3

Analysis

  I personally feel that I'm probably ready to move on from most of the pieces in the 1st bracket (although the studies I will probably keep as warm up for an extended period of time); however, I trust the judgement of my teacher in this regard and am quite likely to end up doing some polishing on quite a few of them.

  I feel like I am getting the basic antics and most of the fingering down for Tarantelle after my initial few sessions of working on it. I'm still mostly doing hands separate on that, but it is quite a fun one to play.

  Here's a short breakdown of practice time per day (does not include lessons):

Realizations and insights

    This entry is more of a log entry for me to track my progress; I will attempt to have more insights on what and where on further updates. As a big takeaway from this week, I would especially note the realization and implication of alternative fingering for the Liszt piece. I did not realize it before as it was not explicitly stated, but there is a relatively standard case of centering on the second page that I did not construe as such initially. These kind of things happen semi-automatically in a lot of pieces, especially over time when one polishes pieces, but the fact that you can consciously think about where you should be for a certain grouping at what time, it allows you to save practice time for more complicated problems.

  The specific scenario was an octave long four note arpeggiation that I could awkwardly reach and was attempting to do so. But simply by dividing it into two groups and moving hand to those positions and to next transition after, the passage became easier and less awkward (one could almost say natural) to play with the left hand; essentially removing the last technically challenging bit from the piece all together. Obviously there are more things to polish there, but all the pieces are there albeit a little crooked.

I also found a new pianist I like Vitaly Pisarenko, never heard of him before, but he plays through some Rachmaninoff quite well and all sorts of Romantic era pieces. Here's a lovely piece of expressive ravel to conclude this week's post.