UKH

Hi all,

I will be playing a piano recital at Otley Courthouse at 1pm tomorrow (Thursday). If anyone on here fancies coming along it would be great to see you. I'm also thinking of a few climbs at Almscliffe afterwards in case that is of interest.

Recital programme is as follows:

Christian Ritter (c.1645-c.1725) - Sarabande in F# minor
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) - Fantasia in C minor BWV 906
Francisco Tárrega (1852-1909), arr. Chris Sansum - Lágrima
Anonymous (19th century), arr. Chris Sansum - Romanza (Spanish Romance)
John Dowland (c.1563-1626), arranger unknown - Galliard: 'Can She Excuse My Wrongs?'
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) - Air and variations: 'The Harmonious Blacksmith'
Orlando Gibbons (c.1583-1625) - Prelude in G major
Claude Debussy (1862-1918) - Rêverie
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) - Nocturne in Db major
Claude Debussy (1862-1918) - Claire de Lune
 

I might throw in the Moonlight Sonata as an encore if anyone claps!

Cheers,

Chris

Wish you'd write another Shardlake novel instead!

Seriously though, good luck tomorrow.

Bravo ! Wearing a morning suit ?

As an accomplished pianist - does piano playing mentality run parallel with climbing - past a crux eg. 'if I just get past this passage I can do the rest' ??

I would really like to but sadly in work....good luck! If you are doing others and could give earlier notification I'd be very grateful to combine something like that as part of a day out!

Booked and looking forward to it

A few pieces more usually heard on guitar or lute in there. That’s quite unusual and I’m interested in why you included them considering the vast amount of works dedicated to the piano.

Sadly I’m a long way from Otley otherwise I’d be vey happy to come along.

good luck with the recital.

I also play clavichord which has a similar sound to a guitar, and a while back made some arrangements of guitar pieces intended for clavichord, but which work well on piano too. I think some of the pieces may have originated on piano anyway!

Great - look forward to meeting you there!

Also a lot of Tudor composers arranged lute pieces for keyboard - John Dowland was the pop music of the day.  I worked on a lot of English virginal music over lockdown on my spinet, and have a fondness for it! I would have brought a spinet and a clavichord along if I didn’t have to tune them myself (I’d be stressed out before the recital even started! 😂 )!

I have just started reading ‘Dominion’ as it happens! The Shardlake novels are great.

Ah, a shame! I should have publicised it a bit earlier - didn’t think of UKC until today! Brain started thinking about climbing, after noticing Almscliffe was just a stone’s throw away! Haven’t climbed for a while - itching to get on some Yorkshire grit afterwards tomorrow!

I did bring the black tie getup, but will probably go a bit less formal.

Best not to think of the cruxes - just focus on the present moment! Letting your guard down on the easy passages is dangerous… 😂

(A bit like climbing I suppose!)

Crikey tuning six strings is more than enough of a task for me!

I do like your programme. I’d be very interested to come along to any future recitals if they’re a bit nearer. Please do post on here in advance. We’re in South Lincs but don’t mind travelling a bit . 

I'm struggling my way through BWV 999; for a 6c man it's got a joyful 6a+ intro then steepens into a v sustained 6b+ with no rests; furthermore unlike a flowing melody the holds on this route are awful to memorise - like Margalef pockets NB. unchalked !

ps. playing at half speed

Please do Chris....hope it goes well...I work with someone who did music originally....got to the point of joining an orchestra but walked away because of the pressure....she is so talented!

I'm so the opposite....lots of appreciation but totally no ability! Let us know for next time...!

Good luck Chris.

I'd have loved to have climbed with you, but I'm teaching tomorrow night. Another time!

Nice to see other musicians on here I love it when UKC strays into classical music territory... I am a professional viola player! I have found there are quite a few muso climbers around, which is always handy when you need a partner on tour

In answer, to the question from LeeWood about the crux of a concert being like a climb, the answer is yes- I regularly find that mental tricks from one can transfer to the other.  Climbing has definitely helped my performing head as if I am ever nervous I think well if I mess it up at least I won't die! And vv when I get nervous in climbing I try to call upon years of training as a musician to manage adrenalin. I did a workshop for music students talking about this very thing! 

Good luck in your recital Chris!

Interesting stuff started by LeeWood's question. I think we are all prone to drawing analogies between the different activities that we pursue, and skilled manual activities in which "failure" can be obvious, such as playing a piece of music or climbing a rock route (as opposed to things with more leeway such as running, or scuba diving) may lend themselves more appropriately to this.

I took up piano 3 years ago (OK I'd had a few years of lessons as a reluctant child, so not a total beginner, but I did have around 30 years "off") and very quickly felt analogies to climbing. Not that I am much good at either activity but that thing about the "crux" seems especially to apply to bouldering where you are advised to work on the crux until you can string the whole problem together; cf break down your piano piece and work on the difficult bars in isolation. I don't have the discipline to apply either of these obviously sensible methods! Rather, with the piano, when there is a "hardest part", I initially "dislike" it and fear reaching that bit, but over time, condition myself to "make friends with my enemy", which seems to work OK whilst somehow making some other part of the same piece - a part that I hitherto had no issue with, the NEW "hardest part" that I keep fluffing. But when I am at this stage in learning a piece, it's a good sign because I will remember that I was previously able to get through this new "hardest part"

NB I am pontificating here from a much lower level than yourself and Chris! My current project is a short Burgmuller piece from OP. 105, no. 4 "La Campanella" - that's about my level and it needs a lot of polishing. 

edit to add - after two years of "playing for myself" with no teaching, I decided to arrange some lessons, not regular ones but at a residential "boot camp" and part of this involved playing recitals in front of the faculty and other participants. As one of the two participants very much "at the bottom of the class", I was at first trepidatious about this but it all turned out to be great exercise in getting through fear/embarrassment, just cracking on with it and "owning the moment" even if you are muddling through, hitting wrong notes, playing at "wading through treacle" speed etc. Also a great motivator to practice practice practice and get it better next time. 

Interesting that there are a few pro musicians on here! I'm originally a Classical Guitarist.....but became electric based as a professional. Only got into climbing properly 7 years ago....the risk of finger injuries put me off before then. Ironically I'm currently recovering from a finger injury, thankfully it didn't affect my ability to play.

Good luck with the concert 👍

It cuts both ways for me ... but I suppose finger injury while making music isn't so common

Thanks Chris, That was a really nice way to spend a Thursday lunchtime. Without UKC I wouldn't have been there.

Sorry the audience wasn't bigger, and as for the two noisy women whilst you were playing the first piece - lack of respect.

Hope you got some bouldering in after.

If you are ever performing locally again give me a shout. Would love to hear some of the other keyboard instruments you play.

Does the 'hardest part' eventually dissappear ? I suspect it must for someone bold enough to step onto the stage - else - you couldn't risk this dread moment. Alternatively good pianists know how to resolve minor errors (like pulling briefly on a qdraw !) but must be wary of expert ears in the audience. So that is where the analogies run out - the crux must happen before you step onto the stage - learning the discipline of focus and concentration (for which I make excuses for myself - I am just too 'bored' to perfect any one piece).

Are you currently receiving tuition - is a teacher selecting your work pieces ? An important element of  learning for me is choosing works that I really like. There exist a ton of low grade options eg. Czerny - which no doubt fit the grade bill but without interest or soul. I have to really like the music to work endlessly. Simplified classics and / or Bach motivate me. To which end - here's a useful link I found only a few days ago:

https://michaelkravchuk.com/free-sheet-music/piano/piano-solo/ 

Hi, first thanks for that link, good clear transcriptions (I find the IPLSM ones often to be scans of very old editions from an era with a different print style which my modern eyes don't really like). 

For your first part - yes analogies can run out and my initial comment should have had the disclaimer that we all like to draw analogies EVEN IF they can be tenuous at best. However, you COULD (at a stretch) that the crux of a climb is "deciding to start it"  
The "hardest part" does eventually disappear, this is what I was trying to express by saying that you work on the first hard part until you get it smoothly, and this tends to make some other bit more difficult than it USED to be, but it's OK because you know you can return to that and more quickly smooth it out because you've already had it smooth before. On the piece that I've probably done the most work on, a short 2-page Etude (no. 2 from Op. 50) by Louise Farrenc, the "hard part" has shifted so many times that I've lost count! I now have just bit left to smooth out, the alignment of a turn with an arpeggiated chord, and I think the solution is to just slow it down very slightly. 

For your second part, 100% agreed and this is why I enjoy it more now as an adult, than as a reluctant child. Childhood learning seemed to involve being told to work on certain pieces by a (surely well intentioned) teacher, perhaps we did get to choose from a small selection but it was hard times and it all depended on what she had several copies of - it's not like we were going out to sheet music shops to spend hard-earned £5.99 or whatever, on books on a whim. 
My approach now is that I have amassed reams of sheet music mostly from charity shops, and every now and then I look through them and see if there is something that looks playable but satisfyingly challenging. That's how I chose the Farrenc and the aforementioned Burgmuller. Of course I'll additionally take external advice. I don't have a regular teacher. I did the aforementioned piano boot camp last year (mine was called Piano Week, 6 day intensive residential at Rugby School last July which consisted of ten one hour one-to-one lessons working on small pieces plus numerous small group lessons on various aspects like jazz, composition, duets, approaches to practice etc, and as much practice as you can bear). Additionally I did a shorter non-residential long-weekend version with the same people last October ("just" six one-to-one lessons across four days), and again at the beginning of April this year, a "light" version with just three lessons). So basically I've had 19 hours of one-to-one lessons, and in the first tranche of these last year we had to unpick bad habits and also look at some real fundamentals on phrasing etc that I'd never been taught as a child. 
These are expensive lessons if you break down the course cost into "£ per hour for one on one" (which is inaccurate and unfair especially on the residentials, as you get a lot out of in-between-lesson conversations with faculty and participants too) but I get enough out of a single hour to keep me going for weeks!

Yes, please do post on here if you're doing another recital.

Hooray for the musos! I've got a big concert day tomorrow - it starts with my daughter doing a flute duet.  No idea what yet, she won't tell me. Then she's performing Kabalevsky piano sonatina in front of 100+ musicians. I will cry (again). And in the evening we have front row tickets for a Modern Juke Box gig - courtesy of  UKC recommendation. Not a bad day.

It would be nice to hear the OP's view - how the recital went for him ??

( slightly off topic, hence the brackets... I wonder how you manage your hands being bith musician and climber? Mine tend to stay clenched, even when not climbing; a musician's would surely need to spread readily - do you exercise your hands post climbing to keep them limber?)

Personally no, but see also the crack gloves thread

It's not so much the hands but the forearms. I got a light forearm pump playing Rachmaninoff today after climbing yesterday. On the plus side it's a lot more interesting than ARC.

There are lots of parallels ........

Some pieces are cruxy, some more sustained

There's the sightreading = onsighting, performing after practice/rehearsal = redpoint

You can also find yourself in ill-judged fingering patterns/hand positions, especially when sight reading, which is like wrong-handing or wrong-footing yourself in climbing.

"Stage death" is feared almost as much as falling off a cliff

There's even a near parallel in grade range - with piano ranging up to grade 8

It would be interesting to compare the ability distributions for particpant groups - I suspect a lot of people plateau around grade 4 piano

Music goes way beyond grade 8.

MrS is a pianist and regularly clocks up 1000s of steps on his Fitbit playing the piano.  

Yes. On the cello (my main instrument) Grade 8 is in many ways a starting point rather than a finishing line. After passing ABRSM Grade 8, you've only just begun to be close to doing full-range scales  - maximum 3 octaves (none in 4), a limited selection of keys, only 2 octaves for Dim 7ths, only one scale in octaves, etc. Many of the demands of standard concert repertoire go way beyond this.

Grade 8 is the minimum requirement for admission at any of the major conservertoires. You could maybe compare it with being able to lead E1 solidly on all types of rock. In the auditions however, you´ll be competing with 17 year olds who led E1 at 12 and who now regularly onsight E4.

Never did grades, attempted them a couple of times but could never really get on with playing stuff I had no interest in.

I talked to Alfred Brendel about this once who was also pretty much self taught and I considered something of a kindred spirit, though obviously in a completely different league.

To put it another way, at least for piano I've recently got the impression that at "professional" level or "high end" or whatever, pieces assigned Grade 8 or below are classed as "easy/intermediate"  

I'd put Grade 8 a bit higher than E1 quite frankly.

Gets name-dropping award of the day! How did that come about and what was he like?

Just at a public event in Edinburgh, after he'd retired and it was only a few words - but I like to think we had similar feelings about formal training

I’ve been down the pub with Professor Leslie Howard! He enjoyed the darts and his tipple was a bottle of a heavy red wine with the highest alcohol content. 

I made a fool of myself by thinking that Diabelli and Scarlatti were Italian 

I'll give you Diabelli (and have learnt something), but what did the prof make of Scarlatti then?? Albeit that Italy didn't exist until a century after he died.

Classed him as Spanish even though he didn't move to Spain until his mid-forties. In fairness it was a conversation about how there isn't a large body of Italian piano works that you could class as "the Italian repertoire" and if you skim-read this (notably a quoted bit in italics), you'll see that despite not moving there until his mid forties, Scarlatti's "important" work was made in Spain and had apparently a Spanish flavour...

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Domenico-Scarlatti

Thanks, I guessed that might be his reasoning. From the point of view of style though, he seems more Italian than Spanish - for example compare with Antonio Soler.

Good discussion point however, sounds like an interesting chap.

ff

Can't edit anymore, so just to add, here's Lauren Zhang playing a (section winning) Sonata in A Major K24 at the 2018 Young Musician:

youtube.com/watch?v=ugYtX5Zygzw&

More informed people than me agree with the professor; Wikipedia also has more details on style and content also.

It's just possible that he is the only actual genius I've met. Certainly in "creative arts".