{"id":315,"date":"2011-05-30T08:51:01","date_gmt":"2011-05-30T13:51:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/?p=315"},"modified":"2011-05-30T08:51:01","modified_gmt":"2011-05-30T13:51:01","slug":"update-after-a-brief-hiatus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/2011\/05\/30\/update-after-a-brief-hiatus\/","title":{"rendered":"Update after a brief hiatus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;t posted in a couple of months. I was out of town on retreat for a couple of weeks, and then just plain busy and not able to get to blogging. Here&#8217;s some of what I&#8217;ve been playing over the last few weeks:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I sort-of learned the Schubert Sonata in B-flat, Op. post. (D. 960). This and the one in G, Op. 78 (D. 850) have always been favorites of mine and I made the resolution this year to learn one or the other. I say &#8220;sort-of&#8221; learned because I didn&#8217;t really work that hard on getting all the notes down right: I fake some of it still. It was much more difficult than I thought that it would be. It&#8217;s difficult in the way of Mozart: lots of exposed lines that need to be very even rhythmically, dynamically, and tonally. This is not something that has ever come naturally to me, and I struggled a bit. But it&#8217;s still fun to play through, especially the first two movements. I&#8217;ll probably work on it some more throughout the year and see if I can clean it up and make it presentable.<\/li>\n<li>After <a href=\"http:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/2010\/12\/05\/sunday-freestyle-playlist-gershwin-returns\/\">that day playing through lots of Gershwin<\/a>, I thought about learning some more of his music. I never thought I&#8217;d do that! (I thought that I was so over that adolescent enthusiasm) But Gershwin wound up on my New Year&#8217;s resolution list, too, and I bought the collection of his own arrangements of his favorite songs. I&#8217;ve heard these, of course, but never thought about learning them myself. So far I&#8217;ve learned four of them: &#8220;The man I love&#8221;, &#8220;S&#8217;wonderful&#8221;, &#8220;That certain feeling&#8221;, and &#8220;Who cares?&#8221; They, too, are difficult. They are such vivid depictions of Gershwin extemporizing at the piano that they require you to adopt his particular way of playing: \u00a0favorite figures, chords, rhythms. These all were completely natural for his fingers, but not for mine, and it&#8217;s a bit like learning a foreign language. But I really want to get to the point where they fall fluently from my fingers, so that I can pretend I&#8217;m in some Fred Astaire movie &#8230;<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s a bit hard to explain, but I&#8217;ve been playing just the &#8220;Full moon and empty arms&#8221; theme from the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto (&#8220;Rocky 2&#8221;, as we called it in my undergrad piano school days). We just got a &#8220;Full Moon Maple&#8221; to plant in the yard, and as a joke I suggested that we play lots of &#8220;moon&#8221; music for it. I love this concerto, as all pianists do. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.discogs.com\/Sergei-Rachmaninov-Warsaw-Philharmonic-Orchestra-Stanis%C5%82aw-Wis%C5%82ocki-Peter-Ilyich-Tchaikovsky-Wiene\/release\/1547541\" target=\"_blank\">1959 Sviatoslav Richter recording with the Warsaw Philharmonic<\/a> is my favorite rendition, a real must-hear. \u00a0In the opening, Richter is so overwhelmingly powerful, you&#8217;re completely at his mercy. A completely riveting phenomenon \u00a0(if you dare, the opening minute is available as a sample at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.deutschegrammophon.com\/cat\/single?sort=newest_rec&amp;PRODUCT_NR=4778584&amp;ART_ID=RICSV&amp;per_page=50&amp;flow_per_page=50&amp;presentation=flow&amp;UNBUYABLE=1\" target=\"_blank\">DG&#8217;s website<\/a>). Anyway, I&#8217;m not about to learn the whole concerto (besides, what orchestra am I going to play with?) but it&#8217;s fun to play just a short solo highlight like this. I&#8217;ve memorized it now so that I can just toss it off when the need arises\u00a0to show off the piano (or just show off, period).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In addition, I&#8217;ve been playing all my usual suspects: Debussy preludes, Ravel&#8217;s Pavane, bits of Satie, Chopin, Beethoven bagatelles, Brahms intermezzi, etc.<\/p>\n<p>Now that summer is here, I expect to have more time to play and hence more to blog about. This week I&#8217;m finally going to get around to putting up that bookcase in the living room to hold my scores. Once that&#8217; s in place, I&#8217;ll pull everything out of the attic and have it close by. More Sunday sightreading possibilities! Plus I just ordered some new scores from Dover: Schumann (another New Year&#8217;s resolution), Liszt, Bach-Busoni, English virginal music, and tangos.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I&#8217;m just starting to learn Feldman&#8217;s <em>For Bunita Marcus<\/em>, and that will certainly generate several blog posts. Look for the first one of those very soon, probably later this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;t posted in a couple of months. Here&#8217;s an update on what I&#8217;ve been playing over the last few weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[32,36,38],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-me-and-my-piano","tag-gershwin","tag-rachmaninoff","tag-schubert"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Update after a brief hiatus - The piano in my life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/2011\/05\/30\/update-after-a-brief-hiatus\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"JamesP\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/2011\/05\/30\/update-after-a-brief-hiatus\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/2011\/05\/30\/update-after-a-brief-hiatus\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"JamesP\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/#\/schema\/person\/2f57a59cb3d4720c55cfc4960b5a3436\"},\"headline\":\"Update after a brief hiatus\",\"datePublished\":\"2011-05-30T13:51:01+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/rosewhitemusic.com\/piano\/2011\/05\/30\/update-after-a-brief-hiatus\/\"},\"wordCount\":693,\"commentCount\":0,\"keywords\":[\"gershwin\",\"rachmaninoff\",\"schubert\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Me &amp; 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