Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to discuss a musical stress test. What am I talking about? You practice, and practice, and practice, but you wonder if you really know the score. How do you know if you have security with the music? Are you ready for a performance? Are you ready for a lesson? Are you ready to accompany someone? How do you know when you’re ready? You don’t want to wait until the moment of truth comes to find out you weren’t prepared! How can you know? Because as you well know, you can play something by yourself in your home perfectly, and then when you try to play it for somebody else, it goes haywire. What can you do to test things out?

Try playing faster.

There are a lot of things you can do to test yourself. You can try playing things faster to see if you can still hold it together. Because when you get nervous, one of the first things that happens is your physiology speeds up a little bit. Your heart rate, your breathing, all of that speeds up. So guess what happens to your playing? You go faster! You don’t even think you’re going faster. I’ll never forget many, many, years ago, listening to recordings of myself as a child, playing in my dad’s student recitals. I couldn’t believe how fast I was going! I was playing faster than I ever played those pieces! It could be a disaster if you’ve never tried your pieces faster, and the first time it happens is during a performance. I’ve had times where I would keep my fingers crossed hearing my students perform in recitals taking outrageously fast tempos they had never tried before, hoping they had some reserve in their playing.

Another great thing you can do is record yourself.

Psych yourself up like it’s an actual performance. Set up a device, and go through your music and make yourself a little bit nervous. Make yourself feel like you are performing. The key is not to stop! Even if you mess up right at the beginning, keep going. Because that can happen in a performance, and you don’t want to start over. Nobody wants to hear you start over. First of all, it’s as much as announcing to everybody that you’ve messed up. But more than that, it destroys the continuity of the performance for the audience. Speaking of which, there’s no better way to create stress than to play for an audience. If you regularly play for people, play for more people. The more people you play for, the more nervous you’re likely to get. That’s the ultimate stress test. And if you c witanhstand that, then you’re ready for anything.

What I recommend is ratcheting up little by little.

Start with recording for a device. Then play for a family member or a trusted friend. Then play for larger and larger numbers of people until you’re ready for an audience. If you can withstand that and you can withstand playing faster than you usually play, you should be ready for a performance. You can also try playing on different pianos as a musical stress test. Play on a piano you’ve never played and see what happens! Right from the get go, without even trying the piano first, just jump right in. Play on as many pianos as you can. It’s a great way to improve your preparedness, because you can’t take your piano with you. Usually, you have to play whatever piano is wherever you are performing. So playing on as many different instruments as possible is another great way to get ready for your performance. Make sure you’re in the best shape possible to withstand anything in your playing. I hope this is interesting for you! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today the subject is about learning the hardest part of a piece first. I’ve talked before about learning a new piece from the beginning and working in sequence. You should read through a piece a couple of times to familiarize yourself with it, then get to work bit by bit learning each phrase hands separately, then put the hands together and connect the phrases. So what’s this business about learning the hardest part first? I talked about starting from the end of a piece also, as one pianist once suggested to me.

I find that learning a piece sequentially generally makes much more sense.

It helps you to understand the whole evolution of thought and the mathematical materials and motifs of a piece of music. Sometimes, though, there’s a piece that has such a monstrously difficult section later on that if you don’t tackle it early, it will hold you up later. Something like a coda to a Chopin Ballade is going to take you a long time to really get polished and solid. If you just start with the coda first, by the time you get there, you’ll have the whole piece together! Because that coda is going to take you so much longer to be able to get up to the level of the rest of the piece.

In certain instances, you want to zero in on the hardest part of a piece first.

Does that mean that you shouldn’t start at the beginning? No. Quite the contrary. You take two approaches at once. You start the piece from the beginning in the manner I described earlier, while dividing part of your practice for working on the hardest section. Just working on the hardest part the whole time when you’re starting a new piece can be very discouraging. After all, you have a piece that you love the sound of, for example the Chopin G minor Ballade. The coda is hard. It will require special attention. But you might want to play that beautiful first theme. That’s something that you can get on a high level much sooner than the coda. So it keeps you engaged, working from two fronts. By the time you get to the coda, you’ve already learned it! You don’t have to learn the whole coda before you even start the piece. But you can work concurrently on the beginning, as well as the coda, and perhaps a couple of other key sections. So when you get to them, they’re not in their infancy. They’re already starting to gel. It is a tremendous benefit in your practice to zero in on some of the hardest sections while going through sequentially from the beginning. That way when you get to these hard sections, they’re already mature. They’ve started to coalesce for you. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. I’m here today with a comment and question from a viewer. They said, “Your enthusiasm is amazing. How do you stay so passionate and enthusiastic? You should make a video on that.” At first when I read that, I was flattered and all. But then I started thinking about it and I thought you might be interested in the backstory as to why I always seem to be upbeat in my videos. I have over 1,200 videos and I don’t think I’m really depressed in any of them. Does that mean I’m never depressed? Well, no. Everybody has their ups and downs.

Growing up, my friends didn’t have a strong appreciation for classical music.

I grew up in a musical household. My father, Morton Estrin, was a concert pianist. Although he was a Professor of Music at Hofstra University, he did most of his teaching right at home. There was a big addition totally separate from the rest of the house where my father taught. So, I did connect with many of his students. But truth be known, my friends couldn’t have cared less about Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin. That stuff wasn’t cool. I would play a few popular songs, but it wasn’t really my thing. I didn’t listen to very much rock music. There were some songs that I really enjoyed, but my whole life was centered around classical music!

After all these years, to find an audience of people who are enthusiastic about the piano and classical music, the way I am, is actually thrilling!

I look forward to these moments. It’s not easy to find them! I manage to make videos every week. I’ve been doing them on YouTube since 2009 and first started making piano videos in the late 1990’s! That’s a long time. But even right now, I’m here in the showroom. Everything looks great. I’m having a good time. But at the same time, our water heater went out. Our basement is flooded and I’m waiting for a plumber to arrive. So, it’s not all as rosy as you may think! But I take life at face value to a great extent.

You live. You die. So you want to make something happen in between!

I make these videos to share the things that are important to me. It really is thrilling to have people watch and care about classical music and the piano in the 21st century. It’s not irrelevant! I’d love to hear your experiences with classical music as a child and growing up. Did people respect you for it, or did they mock you? I wonder what experiences all of you have had being immersed in classical music, assuming you are. You can comment on LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks so much for the question. And I appreciate the support from all of you subscribers out there! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to Living Pianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about stage presence. How much should you move during your performance? How much emotion should you show during a performance? This is a deep subject. You would not believe how important stage presence is. I’m going to tell you a personal story first, then I’m going to talk about specific pianists and how they emote through the way they look on stage.

In high school I had an epiphany.

At my high school we had a student recital. There was one girl who sang and I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard in my life! I was so excited about it that I went to listen to the tape afterwards. But when I listened to it, I was shocked to discover that it wasn’t as great as I had thought it was. How could I have been so off on that? I thought it was a phenomenal performance. But I realized afterwards, the way she looked at the audience and the vibrancy in her whole presentation made it such an experience to watch her. That’s when I realized the significance of how you look on stage.

Your presence during a performance is part of your personal style.

Sometimes I will watch piano competitions on YouTube to see contest winners. It’s very interesting. But because they’re in a contest situation, oftentimes they’re very robotic. I have a video from years ago about extraneous motion in performance that you can see here. But the opposite of moving a lot is just being very still. I had an experience years ago hearing a great recital of Ivo Pogorelich, a phenomenal pianist. It was interesting how he dealt with the whole performance. Just before he came on stage the lights went out. You couldn’t see anything. The spotlight was on the piano. The hall was completely dark when he came out. Before the audience even stopped applauding, he just sat down and played. Straight ahead, business. He didn’t even look at the audience. I hadn’t seen that before. The playing was so superb though that it really didn’t matter, but it was an extreme style. If you’re on that level, maybe you can get away with that. Now, a polar opposite of that is someone like Lang Lang, who shows everything. For those people who are less sophisticated musically, there’s actually a lot of merit to that. You might not realize the mood of a piece, but when it’s shown with gestures, or even on the face of the performer, it can bring people in.

How do you know how much to emote on stage?

Watching concerts of Andre Watts, every single nuance of the music is interpreted through his body language, particularly his facial expressions. You don’t even have to hear the music to know what he’s emoting moment by moment. But how much is appropriate and how much becomes distracting? I think the most important thing about any kind of motion during a performance, or showing emotion on your face, is that it has to be genuine. If you really feel it and you’re showing it, there’s nothing wrong with that. And for those watching for whom the music is new, they’ll probably pay closer attention based upon the gestures or the facial expressions. It gives a clue to people as to what to listen for, which parts are surprising, which parts are sad. It can all be shown. It’s part of the performance.

Think of a great conductor.

The job of a conductor is to convey the feeling of the music, as well as the timing and many more aspects. Look at Leonard Bernstein conducting and you really get the sense of the music just watching him conduct. If you’ve never heard a Brahms symphony, or even if you have, and you watch him conduct it, you’ll understand it on a deeper level just from watching his face and his gestures. Well, the same is true of performers on the piano to some extent. It can be a very good thing to add to the whole experience of going to a concert. Otherwise you can stay home and just listen to the music and have a first class aural experience. But it’s the whole experience that makes the music greater than the sum of the parts. That’s my opinion. I’m Interested in hearing from you! You can leave comments at LivingPianos.com or on YouTube. Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to Living Pianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you should practice the piano every day. Why is it so important? There are a number of reasons. Now, other instruments have their reasons. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m also a French hornist. With the French horn, like many wind instruments, there’s a physiology to the lips which produce the tone. It’s so hard to get back into shape if you miss too many days, because the lips are such tender muscles. The piano doesn’t really have that issue so much. If you miss a day, you’re not going to feel drastically different in your hands. Why is it so important to practice every day, then? Well, there are two reasons, fundamentally.

First, certain aspects of piano practice are extraordinarily difficult and taxing.

Things like memorization can’t easily be crammed into less days. When you’re memorizing music, there’s a certain amount that you can absorb fairly easily. Then it’s an uphill struggle to keep putting more music into your head. You have to really be committed and work extra hard to memorize the third and fourth phrase if you’ve already learned a couple of phrases. It can be done, but it’s harder. So why not take advantage of your fresh mind? Each day, learn something! Even if it’s just a short practice session, it can really help you in the long run if you at least take on some of your score each day.

Second, a lot of times you’ll feel like you’ve made two steps forward and four steps backwards.

When you practice something, then leave it for a day or two, when you come back to it, you might feel like you didn’t even learn anything. It’s so demoralizing! You can’t get that continuity, so you’re just learning the same thing again. Not only is it not as productive, but it kind of drains your soul. You don’t feel excited about practicing when you come back to the same problems over and over again. But if you come back to it the next day, you’ll forget some from the previous day, but it’ll come back pretty quickly. Then you can get right to work learning more music. It’s encouraging. You can keep the momentum going.

Use your mind when it’s fresh, even if it’s for a short practice session.

Keep the continuity of your learning day by day. This is not only a good technique for memorization, but also refinement. You might have an epiphany into your technique with arpeggios, but then you’ll skip a day or two and you come back to it and the same issues persist. So practice every day, even if it’s only a little bit. You might not have much time, but by using any little time you do have each day, you can maintain productive practice. Dinner’s in the oven, you’ve got 10 minutes. Practice! Even those short amounts of time make a big difference if you do it on a regular basis. I do the same thing with exercise, by the way. When I’m waiting for something I’ll do some simple exercises and stretching. Take advantage of every moment with the things that are important in your life. Over time it makes a dramatic difference! That’s the message for today. I hope it works for you! Let me know in the comments on LivingPianos.com and on YouTube. Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I want to tell you about what I learned watching my father, Morton Estrin, practice the piano. It brings back such memories. We grew up in a house in the suburbs on Long Island, about an hour from Manhattan. When we first moved into that house, I was five years old. It was a very exciting time. My father had a studio built. We had a pretty big house to begin with, but the studio was enormous! We had a lot of concerts there, and a lot of fun.

Although my father taught music at Hofstra University, he did most of his teaching right in the back of our house.

He did an immense amount of teaching! But whenever my father had any time free from teaching, he would be practicing piano. I would often go down there to sit and listen to him. I always found it interesting. I want to share with you an extremely personal story about what I learned watching him practice. This was really an epiphany. And I’m going to share something that was kind of a sad mishap that I’ve never really shared with anybody.

My father had an illustrious recording career.

My father started making records in the 1950s. His first recording was the complete Chopin Ballades and the F Minor Fantasie, for Fantasy Records by coincidence. Then he did some recordings of the music of Meyer Kupferman. These were pieces written specifically for him. They were extremely difficult 12 tone pieces that he played all from memory! Then he started making a series of recordings for Connoisseur Society Records. Alan Silver, who was the producer and the owner of the company, was truly an artist. What he was able to achieve both sonically and musically in his recordings was truly astounding! I love those recordings to this day.

My father’s first record for Connoisseur Society was the Scriabin Opus 8 Etudes, which won record of the year.

It was the first LP of these magnificent works. Wonderful performances! Then he recorded the Rachmaninoff Opus 32 Preludes. He performed the complete Rachmaninoff preludes on several occasions, including in Lincoln Center. It’s a mind boggling task!

There was a time when he was preparing a Liszt record. I remember attending the sessions. Somehow things just didn’t gel. And even though everything was set up and the piano was chosen and the technician was there, they had to abandon the session. It was a really tenuous moment, but that’s what happened. So some time went by and then the next recording my father decided to do with Connoisseur Society Records was a Brahms album. They also had a plan for a series of albums entitled, Great Hits You Played When You Were Young, which sounds kind of corny. But these ended up being really popular. The performances were so magnificent and the recording quality was exquisite. Radio stations just loved these records! They were played constantly all over the world!

In preparation for those sessions, he worked so hard that he ended up recording three records in one series of sessions! It was just a few days. They thought it was going to be the Brahms and maybe one of these discs. He just had so much repertoire at such a high level that he slammed through three complete albums in the one session!

I’m going to reveal to you what I learned from listening to his preparation for those recording sessions.

I remember listening to him practice. He got to a point where he would just be going through everything with no pedal, taking everything a little bit under tempo. Every single finger just fell in place. It was exciting for me to hear him play like that because there was such unbelievable refinement and security in his playing. He prepared so unbelievably for those sessions. It was astounding! There were so many of those recordings that were just the first take. He was that well-prepared. He just went through all of this music. And by the way, you must listen! I’ll have links below for these discs.

You want to get to the point where you have ultimate security in your playing.

I knew from listening to my father practice that the recordings were going to be great. He was so completely prepared, he could play everything accurately in a completely relaxed manner. Most classical recordings have a lot of editing because it saves time. If you have a work that’s 20 minutes long, to get one perfect performance is very difficult. On recordings, if you have just a little cracked note that you might not notice in a live performance, it’s really annoying when you listen over and over again. But he was so well prepared for this that a minimum amount of editing was necessary.

So that’s my personal story for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this! Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

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Supplemental Links:

Rachmaninoff Opus 32 Preludes
Scriabin Opus 8 Etudes
Chopin Ballades and the F Minor Fantasie
The Music of Meyer Kupferman: II
Great Hits You Played When You Were Young