Piano Video Lesson: How to Play with Rubato

So you just can't quite stay with it, can you? So this is how you can check your Rubato to make sure you're doing it without being excessive.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. Robert Estrin here asking, how do you know if you're playing too much Rubato? Rubato is a practice of expressive playing in romantic music that achieves a speeding up and a slowing down to the top of the phrase and the coming away from it. Adding the emotionalism, when it's done well, it can have a very profound effect upon the feeling of the music, as you can hear here.

Now, if any of you try to tap along with that, you probably could do it. You might feel me pulling you along and holding back, but you could tap to it. How do you know when you're doing too much Rubato? Try to tap along with this one.

So you just can't quite stay with it, can you? So this is how you can check your Rubato to make sure you're doing it without being excessive. Record yourself playing a piece and go back and see if you could tap your foot to it or tap your hand to it. If you can, it might not be excessive. As long as you can feel where that beat is, then you pull your listener along with it. But if you can't tap to the music that you play or somebody else plays, then it might be self-indulgent going too far with Rubato and losing the whole pulse of the music. So that's the way you can check your music. Again, I'm Robert Estrin. This is livingpianos.com, your online piano resource. If you like these videos, a thumbs up will help reach more people. We'll see you next time.

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