I have also discovered a couple of useful videos recently too. The first being a series of 4 lessons with Seymour Bernstein based on his best selling book "With your own two hands". He goes deep into the mechanics of playing the piano both from the pianos point of view and the human playing it. One tip he suggested, that made an immediate difference to my playing, was to consciously relax the underside of the forearms as there is a natural inclination to tense this area particularly if the going is getting a little difficult. Most edifying!
The second channel I think might be worth your while checking out is Paul Barton's "Classical Piano in Thailand" of all places. This guy really knows his stuff and is a pretty handy player too. I first discovered him by accident really when I viewed his lesson on Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu.
After an interesting and quite lengthy historical explanation of the piece and his views on why Frederic refused to publish it he hops in to how to play it. This explanation included some very useful diagrams such as the following explaining how triplets in the left hand fit with semiquavers in the right hand which is an integral part of this Impromptu. Bloody good stuff and I will be checking out more of his videos.
The final part of this lengthy and feature filled post is that I had the unexpected opportunity to play a brand new Kawai Baby Grand and it was a pleasure and I would have liked to have spent a lot more time playing it. The lucky owner is an acquaintance of ours who runs the local newspaper with her husband. It looks like she and I will be sharing the same piano teacher starting in March and I will let you know more about that soon.
Well Now that I have used Padrucci a few times I can no longer recommend it because it crashes every time you start to move your way through a multi page score. Most disappointing because I really like the way that it provides access to the whole Petrucci library. I have since downloaded another similar app called iclassicalscores that only lets you search for particular pieces and the search terms are pretty narrow as they will return nada if you are not precise enough. However, it is actually usable so for the moment it seems to be the best option currently and is considerably cheaper.
ReplyDeleteI can now report that the lastest version of Padrucci is finally working as it should, that I have returned to using it again and can now recommend it!
ReplyDeletesorry, but on iPad v1 still no go. opens a splashscreen and then dies out.
Deletewebsite is blank page, apple refuses refund and voila, we have a lemon application.
someone serious has to look into IMSLP library application.
Ah that is a shame to hear. It is still a little buggy in iPad 2 as well but at least you can find and download music. I reckon that there are memory problems and that maybe whoever has developed the app does not completely understand it's management in Objective C. Hopefully it will continue to improve and there is always iClassicalScores as an alternative.
ReplyDelete