…that I haven’t added to this blog for a while, but I haven’t been that active on the piano and have been waiting for the prognosis on my eye before I can decide on how I handle things in the future.
The good news is that the gas bubble in the eye has now gone and I’ve got a clean bill of health from my surgeon, who I now have to visit again in some three months time. The eye is not quite as good as it was (I expected that) and also I have fluid effects in the eye which means that I can’t use the eye for anything close up. So long distance I can use my left eye, and my brain has actually started to do that, but for short distances and reading I have to use my right eye.
As far as the piano is concerned, I’m still finding that my left eye is interfering and quite often I have to close my left eye to ensure that I’m focusing properly. What this means in practice is that technically I have problems with wide leaps in both hands – so I have quite a bit of work to do to improve my accuracy in that regard.
The other thing it means is that I have to memorise the music because switching from the printed page to the piano is now more awkward than it used to be. Given the fact that I’ve commented elsewhere in my blog that my memory is also not what it used to be this is not something that fills me with delight, but nonetheless it is what I must improve on.
So it will be slow and steady progress over the next few months to reinvent once again the way I play the piano. I will be sticking to the programme I have set myself in terms of my recording priorities, but I am in all probability not going to be of the same technical standard as I was (not that that was brilliant in the first place) before my operation.
My cor anglais and oboe playing is improving, although my breath control needs to be better. I’m slowly standardising on the longer scrape reeds rather than the European scrape – I just can’t handle those yet. I’ll never really be that good on these, but at least the sounds are beginning to be musical.
I have been amusing myself (yes, I know this sounds elitist but there really is a funny side to anything if you look hard enough) by following some of the piano-centric fora on the net. I won’t mention which ones of course, but it does seem to me that many people (not all) use these things as an ego trip to try to demonstrate their own superiority over other contributors. Most of the time they get rightfully put in their place and their standard response is to make a brief irrelevant comment to try to shore up their position and then disappear for a while licking their wounds until they have the guts to try again. My own modest contributions to such fora are as factual as I can make them, but still I find that some will try to distort the facts for their own purpose.
My purpose is to correct any misinformation about Stuart pianos, and fortunately things are quiet on that front so I haven’t contributed to anything for a while.
I am quite relieved about that.