Piano Video Lesson: How To Keep a Piano Piece in Shape

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. Robert Estrin here with such an important subject, how to keep a piano piece in shape. Sometimes it's the most difficult thing. You have a performance and you get everything in good shape and then like a piece of fruit, like a banana that suddenly it was great. And then the whole bunch is just a disaster and you got to throw it away. Sometimes that happens with your piano music. Everything is going just fine and then suddenly you feel like you can't even play and you wonder now what to do? It's a tremendous challenge keeping music on a high level. Sometimes you can peak early, everything's in shape, and then the performance is just two, three days later and everything disintegrates and you wonder how can you get it back into shape? And that's what you're going to learn here today on this video.

So one of the most important practice techniques for a piece you have learned, whether it's a reading piece or a memorized piece, is to go back through the score slowly with no pedal with the metronome and exaggerating everything. So you take a piece of music, even if it's a quiet piece of music, it really doesn't matter what the piece is, but you play it with everything articulated, over articulated. I'm just starting to think what piece to use. It could be anything. Let's say the first Bach prelude from Well-Tempered Clavier. The prelude C major. And you know, you play it.

Well, if everything is fine, great, but suppose you're playing it and stupid little things are happening and you have insecurity and the technique isn't clean. Go back to the score, go slowly, take your foot off the pedal and play it incredibly deliberately, almost like you're practicing scales or arpeggios slowly with raised fingers. So you kind of reprogram your hands and you reprogram the sound into your head by playing very deliberately with raised fingers with a metronome.

Now you'll instantly know if this piece has gone overly ripe and started to show some signs of rot because when you try to play it slowly, suddenly you can't play it and you wonder, "What's going on?" And you'll be tempted to go back to the beginning and just play it fast, just so you can have the satisfaction of playing it again. But make sure you do take the opportunity to slow it down and figure out how to play it slowly and deliberately, whatever the piece is. This is the answer, keeping your eyes on that score, playing with a metronome, without pedal, deliberately playing. And if there's staccatos in the piece, you want to articulate those with the wrist, exaggerate all the dynamics, exaggerate every finger that goes up, that goes down so you really feel it. It gives you that opportunity, especially if you have a fast piece you've played... Like our Shubert Impromptu in E flat, for example, going back and really digging into the keys.

Notice that even though I played very deliberately and louder than you think it should go at the beginning, I still made the differentiation when the dynamic changed to mezzo forte or forte after the repetition of that first phrase. So you still have the dynamics, but everything is kind of raised up and you'll find that anything that's weak, anything that you really don't know, your fingers sort of have a memory all their own, but you can't depend upon that. And after a while, like copying a tape to a tape, to a tape in the olden days, and you have the degradation, unlike digital, which is a clone, you'll find that the music will deteriorate over time and your fingers don't really know what they're doing anymore if you just keep playing over and over and over, and don't go back to the original, the original source. The score. Use that metronome, take the foot off the pedal so you can hear what you're doing and watch carefully.

You will learn so much and it will help to revitalize your music so it stays in shape, or you can get it back into shape using the same technique. Let me know how it works for you. I love your comments here on LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Again, I'm Robert Estrin and thank you for subscribing and you can subscribe on Patreon and get even more content just for you. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-keep-a-piano-piece-in-shape/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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