The summer is over and the new academic year has begun. My ideas for a rich and relfective end-of-summer post slipped away during the beginning-of-the-school-year faculty seminar. But that's alright with me since the nostalgia of the transition has been replaced by fresh learning and new noticing.
The practice time of the summer prepared a space in life, and a pace of life, for ongoing piano practice. Many days, I am able to spend an hour or two at the piano in fairly concentrated work. I have, for the most part, accepted that this practice time supercedes some other priorities and am somewhat at peace about other things taking longer because I am putting some time in at the keyboard.
My new schedule at Southeastern involves more piano teaching than the previous three years. I have nine private piano students in addition to my theory and class piano teaching. These students keep me busy with thinking about a range of repertoire.
Standards from the Romantic era have been on my mind this week, each with its own brand of magic.
The imagination of Grieg's piano concerto can be easy to take for granted since the work is so familiar. Returning to the piece after many years, I am touched by the power of the first movement's classic conflict proclaimed by the rhetoric of the solo piano. My student and I also noticed the great variety of themes that move quickly and fluidly from one to the next throughout the first movement.
Many of us pianists have a couple of stories in the back of our minds when we hear this piece. One is of Liszt sightreading the concerto and encouraging Grieg because he recognized Grieg's original voice and masterful craft. The other is Rachmaninoff's statement that this is the ideal concerto. Teaching the piece now gives me a deeper appreciation of those two great pianists' takes on its significance.
Yesterday morning, I had the fun of teaching Liszt's well-known Liebestraum. The famous melody is, as a theory student once said of the opening theme of Chopin's C Sharp Minor Nocturne Op. 27 No. 1, a "forming melody." It begins with repetitions of the same note, then moves a little stepwise, and finally takes on a much more melodic shape.
My favorite discovery from this lesson is that some of the magic of Liszt's "dream of love" is contained in a single marking, a decrescendo that makes all the difference. If one were to play measures 15 through 20 purely on instinct, the goal could very well be the downbeat of 19, which is the point at which the harmony points back to the home key following a striking detail of harmonization (a quick trip to E major from A flat major). Liszt's decrescendo lets us know not to make that turning-home harmony the goal but to have the sound recede at this point. Thus, when we put the decrescendo in the right measure, the transformation of the melody through a fresh harmonization quickly slips back into the haze of the dream consciousness.
Another student brought Brahms's Opus 118. Earlier in the day, I had taught a bit of 18th-century counterpoint, a style in which the resolution of 4ths and 7ths, and so forth, is so important. Those expressive gestures move from the level of meaningful moments in Baroque music to constituting the very fabric from which the first movement of the Brahms is made. Every measure has an appogiatura or suspension or two or three. The result is music that of urgency that is constantly yearning.
The second movment of this Brahms set is a beautiful study in the sense of growth exhibited by phrases. To place this with satisfying expression requires a sense of elegant movement through majestic spaces: something like this.
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