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What better way to start a new year at the piano with some new repertoire? But where to start? Perhaps the greatest joy – and frustration – of being a pianist is the vast and wonderful repertoire available to us, from Baroque arabesques to über-contemporary fancies. One could spend a lifetime exploring the piano music of Beethoven or Chopin and still only scratch the surface. For many of us, our tastes are shaped from our earliest days at the piano, usually by our teachers, and they continue to form and develop as we learn and expand our musical horizons.

With such a vast repertoire available, it can be difficult to know where to start when selecting new music. For me, a constant source of inspiration is concerts. You hear it live, which gives a wonderful sense of the music – and don’t think that just because the pros are playing it, it must be impossible. Many concert pieces are not nearly as complicated as they may sound. The radio is also a useful source of ideas, as are music streaming services such as Spotify and LastFM, which offer recommendations based on your listening habits. Spotify has a particularly large archive of classical music, with some wonderful rarities, including recordings of both Rachmaninoff and Ravel (and others) playing their own piano music – wonderfully inspiring. YouTube is another good resource.

Recommendations from friends and colleagues can be very useful too. For example, a pianist friend of mine flagged up the recordings from the annual Rarities of Piano Music festival, which have proved a rich source of potential new repertoire for me. It is also interesting to explore lesser-known repertoire.

It’s important to keep variety and spice in what we choose to play, whether we are studying for exams and diplomas, preparing for a concert or competition, or simply playing for pleasure. If we grow bored of our repertoire, we can get lazy about it and silly errors and hard-to-erase mistakes can creep in. I always have quite a broad range of music “on the go” at any given time, and lately I have tended to focus on one or two quite challenging works (LRSM/FRSM standard), music that lies easily within my playing “comfort zone”, and some easy pieces (for example, Elgar’s Dream Children, which I enjoyed playing during the autumn and which found its way into a couple of concert programmes). I like to have wide chronological sweep too, and at the moment I am working on music by Bach, Mozart, Liszt, Bartok, Messiaen, Britten and Cage. I am also looking forward to tackling some piano music which has only just been written (Portraits for A Study by Jim Aitchison).

Even if you are busy with repertoire for an exam or Diploma, I think it is important to supplement your main learning with other pieces to guard against boredom (it is also a good idea to “rest” pieces on which you have been working for some time). Maybe consider some “lateral repertoire” – by which I mean, if you like the music of Chopin, for example, why not explore the piano music of fellow countryman, Karol Szymanowski? And if you like Debussy, and would like to try some later French piano music, how about Olivier Messiaen? His ‘Preludes’ (1929) show Debussyan influences and also look forward, in their harmonies and idioms, to his greatest piano work, the Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jesus. These kind of musical explorations can often throw an interesting new light on existing repertoire and offer useful food for thought.
There is plenty of copyright-free music available on the internet, which can be downloaded and printed out, or saved on a tablet device. Always remain open to new ideas and inspirations, and you will enjoy a wealth of fabulous piano music.

Happy new year, and happy practising!

 

Copyright-free music online:

IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library

Piano Street

 

 

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Toru Takemitsu (source: Wikipedia)

“My music is like a garden – and I am the gardener”

Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996)

It was rather wonderful to wake to the sounds of the music of Toru Takemitsu on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme on Friday morning. An unexpected pleasure, as such music is usually reserved for the wilder shores of Radio 3.

Takemitsu was a composer, but he was also a writer on aesthetics and musical theory. His music is delicate and refined, as beautiful as Hokusai print or a carved jade netsuke. Largely self-taught, his music combines elements of Japanese and western philosophy with the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre, using both western and traditional Japanese instruments, and the use of defined silences to create a unique and extraordinary soundworld.

Takemitsu admired Debussy and Messiaen, as is evident in his piano music, and was drawn to composers who were themselves deeply influenced by the musical and philosophical culture of Asia, including John Cage. After my very positive experience with Messiaen for my ATCL Diploma programme, and my love of the piano music of Debussy, the desire to explore the piano music of Takemitsu seemed a natural one.

Takemitsu composed his Rain Tree Sketch II in 1992 in memory of Oliver Messiaen (1908-1992), the French composer who had a strong influence on Takemitsu. The work was composed for a concert “Hommage à Olivier Messiaen” at Les Semaines Musicales Internationales d’Orleans, France, and was premiered by Alain Neveux on 24 October 1992. The name of the work was probably inspired by a quotation from a novel by Kenzaburo Oe about the miraculous rain tree, whose tiny leaves store up moisture and continue to let fall raindrops long after the rain has ceased. The work is also a dreamy meditation on the flow of life, and was the last piano piece Takemitsu wrote (his first Rain Tree Sketch was written in 1982). It is in a clear ABA (ternary) form, with a rhythmic opening which is reprised, in shortened form, after the melodic middle section. Its tonal language is redolent of Debussy and Messiaen, with chords used for colour and timbre rather than strict harmonic progressions, and, like its dedicatee, Takemitsu employs recurring motifs (such as an ascending three-note broken chord figure) and well-placed silences to create a carefully nuanced atmosphere and colouristic shadings. Directions such as “celestially light” and “joyful” contribute to the metaphysical nature of this work.

There are some written in pedal markings, and these should be adhered to as the composer directs. Elsewhere, use of the pedal is at the discretion of the pianist. I tend on the side of restraint and use half or one-third pedal to avoid obscuring the clarity of the chords and melodic figures. Regarding the bars of silence, these should sound expectant and anticipatory, rather than dead; using the pedal to allow sounds to “ring” will help achieve this.

The metronome markings in the piece are somewhat ambiguous. On the dedication page of the score, the duration is given at 5 minutes, but if one adheres to the metronome markings exactly, the piece comes in at around 3 minutes. I have opted for a calm moderato, a sense of the music moving forward, but without pressing ahead. In my Diploma programme, this piece comes between the Bach D minor concerto BWV 974 and Mozart’s Rondo in A minor K511. The contrast is, to me, rather special, and I feel it works well.

While researching the programme notes on this piece for my Diploma, I came across an interesting piece of research in which the author discusses the suggestion of traditional Japanese instruments in this work, and other piano works by Takemitsu, specifically the Taiko drum (the low D pedal point at the opening of page 2), and the long zither koto and the short-necked lute biwa (the ascending arpeggio figure suggests the plucked sound of these instruments). The article contains many interesting thoughts about Takemitsu’s piano music, and is definitely worth exploring further.

As for performances of this work, when I heard Noriko Ogawa perform it at the Wigmore last autumn, I was struck by the incredible soundworld she managed to achieve, producing “droplets” of notes and really evoking the miraculous rain tree (my review here). The recording I have been using for reference in my study of this piece is by Ichiro Nodaira: I particularly like the relaxed tempo of the opening melody.

The pianist Paul Crossley has recorded Takemitsu’s complete piano music, sadly, now out of print, though available via some music streaming services and Spotify.

 

Further listening:

Rain Tree Sketch

Litany

Les yeux clos

Piano Pieces for Children: No. 2. Clouds

The first page of Rain Tree Sketch II (Schott Music)

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An intriguing envelope, postmarked from Ireland, dropped through my letterbox this morning, a welcome change from the daily deluge of Christmas mail. The A4 sheet of text, which accompanied the enclosed CD, immediately caught my attention when I saw the name Joyce Hatto, and initially I misread the text, thinking I’d been sent a recording to review by one of the artists Joyce and her husband ripped off in the course of their great classical music scam.

Pianist Archie Chen with actress Maimie McCoy who plays Joyce Hatto (right) as a young woman
Pianist Archie Chen with actress Maimie McCoy who plays Joyce Hatto (right) as a young woman

In fact, the CD, a collection of works by Chopin, performed by pianist Archie Chen, relates to the upcoming BBC biopic of Joyce Hatto, Loving Miss Hatto. Written by Victoria Wood and starring Francesca Annis and Alfred Molina, the film will be aired on Sunday 23rd December on BBC One.

Archie Chen is indeed the pianist “behind the hands” –  in that he provides the music for the film, under the direction of the musical director Niall Byrne. Chen himself is the pianist playing in the film, and he was also charged with teaching the actress Maimie McCoy, who plays Joyce as a young woman, how to play convincingly for the camera. The challenge for Chen was to learn some of the most difficult works in the repertoire in a very short space of time. As Chen himself says of working on the film: “I’m in such a privileged position to be involved in this project……I really relished the challenge of learning the most fiendishly difficult Godowsky Studies…..The hardest part was putting in the mistakes!”.

The release of the film coincides with the launch of Chen’s new CD ‘Chopin’, which features some of the composer’s best loved works, including the Ballade No. 3, the Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat minor op. 31, and all of the Impromptus, as well as the B minor Sonata. The opening Impromptu, in A-flat major, is a joyful outpouring, Chen opting for a more relaxed tempo than some performers, with restrained rubato and a thoughtful middle section. The Ballade No. 3 is graceful and elegant, with tasteful rubato and an enjoyably lilting tempo, which calls to mind the chime of a carriage clock (perhaps on the mantelpiece at Nohant?). In the Scherzo, once again a more spacious tempo allows us to enjoy all the contrasting elements and drama of this work. Likewise in the Sonata, tempos are measured and well thought out, in particular in the final movement (marked Presto non Tanto, far too many pianists, in my opinion, take this movement at such a gallop many of the details of the music are lost). Clean and expressive playing throughout, coupled with considered tempos and spare use of rubato, make this a CD to enjoy over several listenings.

Archie Chen ‘Chopin’ is available on CD or as a download

Archie Chen’s website

An earlier article I wrote on Joyce Hatto

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by Madelaine Jones

20120506-084746.jpgCall me a philistine, but I have never liked Wagner. I tried watching Tristan and Isolde on DVD and gave up – the shrill of an over-bearingly loud soprano hovering somewhere between Romanticism and atonality almost sent me into convulsive fits. The thought of sitting through the entire ‘Ring Cycle’ made me shiver with boredom. I found his style over-indulgent and lacking substance, and since I never really understood the appeal of the composer or what he was trying to achieve, I never really got to understand or enjoy the compositions – that is, until I found his piano works.

Turns out Richard Wagner’s earlier exploits into composition were not as overly expansive and luxurious harmonically as we’ve grown to expect when we hear the name. His Opus 1, it turns out, was a piano sonata, and even more surprisingly, one you could well be forgiven for mistaking at first for early Beethoven/late Haydn, despite the odd Romantic turn of phrase in places. In fact, by the very nature of the key it is written in (B flat was a particularly favourable of Beethoven’s, the key of both his ‘Grand’ Sonata, op. 22, and the famous ‘Hammerklavier’, op. 106) and some tongue-in-cheek quotes from other works (within a few bars of the second movement, note the reference to the beginning of Beethoven’s Eb major sonata, Op. 31/3) show that Wagner clearly had a far deeper respect for the Classical era than most people credit him with.

This new side to Wagner got me interested: if he was not so outlandishly Romantic and over-expressive as I had first considered him, what other gems of his piano music were out there and why hadn’t we heard of them? Next, I stumbled across the Fantasia in F sharp Minor, written in the same year (1831). The opening ringing of the chords instantly struck a resemblance to the famous Mozart Fantasy in D Minor and so I was fascinated and continued listening. The lyrical and poignant recitative passages interspersed with expressive melodies and tormented chordal cries grabbed me as something incredibly beautiful, but also well-crafted and poised. I continued looking: the delightfully cheeky Polka, so full of character given its brevity, the stately Polonaises, the sentimental Albumblatt for E.B. Kietz (interestingly subtitled a ‘Lied Ohne Worte’ – maybe his respect was abundant towards Mendelssohn as well, though the more Romantic lilt to this piece might suggest otherwise!) all struck me as wonderful music that’s been brushed under the carpet.

So why, if this music is so fantastic, do we not play it or hear it anymore? Why is this side of Wagner kept hidden? The answer to that, I would hazard a guess, is that most of these piano works were fairly early in Wagner’s output – in his 70 years of life (1813-1883), the majority of his piano works were composed in the first half, and once his success in the world of opera kicked in, he seemed less inclined to compose piano music, instead favouring more expansive mediums of composition. Since his style then blossomed into a much more experimental breed of High Romanticism, the simplicity of his earlier works became unduly neglected by listeners. Despite being less outlandish, I think the pieces themselves are absolutely charming, and deserved to be remembered, if not only for their artistic merit, but also to give us an insight into the thinking of a clearly multi-faceted composer, who is most certainly not insensitive and over-indulgent as I first thought. Now I have a far better appreciation of his genius, I might even hazard giving Tristan another go…

Links:
Sonata in Bb, Op. 1, WWV 21 (1st movement)

Fantasia in F sharp minor, WWV 22

Albumblatt to E.B. Krietz

 

Madelaine Jones is currently a student at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, studying piano and harpsichord with Penelope Roskell and James Johnstone respectively. She was the winner of the Gladys Puttick Improvisation Competition 2012 with duo partner and dancer, Adam Russell. Her ensemble experience as a pianist has included working alongside the BBC Singers, the Medway Singers and the Walderslade Primary School Choir, and she has performed as a harpsichordist and chamber organist in the Greenwich International Early Music Festival alongside Trinity Laban’s various Early Music Ensembles. Madelaine is a recent recipient of an LCM London Music Schools and Teachers Award, and is also a keen writer in her spare time.