Wed-November 6, 2002

Practiced Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G minor, Schubert's Impromptu Op. 90, No. 3, Chopin's Fantasy in F minor, Liszt's Sonetto 104 del petrarca, and played a few Mendelssohn's Songs without Words .

I've been playing Rachmaninoff's prelude too fast and I need to do a better job of playing the chords with clarity and maybe try practicing the piece without pedaling. What I find most challenging is "bouncing" back quickly after a succession of 3 chords. This is very difficult to execute on the Yamaha grand (since there's a lot of resistance to the keys) whereas it's manageable on my Steinway upright. With more practice, I should be fine.

With Schubert's Impromptu, I need to play it through many times and work on the left hand trills. Tomorrow I'm going to make markings in the book....and determine which fingers play the left hand notes. I've noticed that I play some notes using different fingers each time, which is probably slowing me down (in terms of memorizing the piece). I think I have the first two pages memorized....and the tricky thing about learning this piece is that it's full of variation of themes....there are subtle differences between the variations....and I have to make a note of how they're different.

I've been putting off Chopin's Fantasy in F minor for awhile now. It's just a lot of chords (that seem foreign to me..a lot of chords) and it takes around 20-30 minutes to run it through once. Should I break it up into sections and practice that way? Like Schubert's Impromptu, it's a series of variations and there are subtle differences among them...As Will pointed out with my recording of the Raindrop prelude, my pedaling needs some major work. With the raindrop prelude, i didn't half-pedal as often as I probably should. So I'll make a mental note of that when I practice tomorrow. Back in March, I heard Olga Kern play this piece....and she played it rather well. In this Notes from the Bench book I recently bought, the author (Berman) writes how the wrist should sway laterally when I"m doing the phrasing. I guess this is similar to the Barcarolle.

With Mendelssohn's pieces...they're fairly short and the ones I practiced sounded like fugues. The pieces are not difficult to play but will be more of a challenge to memorize. I haven't picked out the ones I want to really learn, yet.

Liszt's Sonetto 104 is progressing along nicely. I have to remember what Cathy told me about the pedaling with the b notes and notes adjacent to it....how i should let go of the pedal right after playing B. Did i get this right?

Just practice, practice, practice.