… is actually pretty good at the moment. My part of the recital yesterday went off pretty well, I thought. As well as accompanying two very good singers in music that we didn’t really have much time to rehearse, I played a few pieces that felt pretty good under the fingers and my eyesight didn’t seem to be too much of an issue. Overall, I played:
- Odeon, by Ernesto Nazareth
- Prelude in B minor by J.S.Bach, arranged by Alexander Siloti
- Drift Light, from Three Pieces of Light by William Baines
- Four Mazurkas Opus 24 by Frederick Chopin
Audience reaction was very positive and overall I felt that I’m still on the right track as far as my piano playing is concerned.
For me, however, the interesting part was listening to myself and comparing how I played on the performance piano as distinct from the Stuart. I’ve commented a number of times on this blog about the differences between the Stuart and other pianos and how pianists have to adapt to those changes – after all that is an essential part of the philosophy behind these pianos.
I played on a six-seven year old Kawai upright. Compared to what I’m used to I found the bass and the overall sustain lacking, as you might expect, and the action a bit uneven. That is not a criticism of the piano as such, because you can’t expect any more than that given the age and incipient quality of the piano. So I found that:
a) I had to hit the bass harder than I would like, which resulted in a fairly rough and percussive sound which died away fairly quickly. In the Baines piece in particular, this meant that I couldn’t rely on the sonority of the piano nearly so much to produce the complex tonality typical of the piece, and so I found myself unconsciously playing the piece a bit faster than I would normally do. The overall sound was adequate – but as expected the piece was nowhere what it should have been in terms of piano sonority.
b) The Chopin Mazurkas fitted the piano much better than I thought they would. The bass is nowhere near as prominent as it is in the Baines, but by the same token the midrange and treble are much more important and given that these pieces are not nearly as sonorous in the sense of requiring sustain (it should be remembered that Chopin was very happy to play, and thus compose for, upright pianos) I still found that I needed to play a bit faster than I would on the Stuart, and also I tended to use more damper pedal than I do on the Stuart.
c) The Kawai had a dolce pedal as distinct from a una corda, but I found it next to useless because the hammers were shifted to be very close to the strings and this sounded very muted and throttled. Obviously good for practicing (the recalcitrant neighbour syndrome) but not much else.
So, overall, very much as expected. There is no doubt that different pianos require different playing – that much is intuitively obvious. It points out that pianists have to adapt – and quickly – to optimise their performance given the materials at hand. There is no point in playing an upright piano as though it were a grand, as indeed there is no point in playing a Stuart piano as though it was a Steinway, and vice versa.
Wayne was right in that he told me that if I played another piano after a Stuart piano my playing would ‘regress’ in the sense that I would obviously not be able to reproduce what the Stuart is capable of doing on another piano that couldn’t do it. I was comfortable with what I did given what I had to play on, which as I said was not shabby by any means. Pianists need to pick performance repertoire to suit the piano at hand and there is no point in blaming the piano if it can’t handle what you throw at it.
Once thing I can say is that the Stuart can handle anything I throw at it, and from what I’ve heard, anything that anyone else can throw at it as well, from Bach to Berio, Weber to Vine etc etc. I don’t think you can get better than that.