Search Options:

Showing Search Results for: exercises

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about the two different kinds of encores. There are fundamentally two different types of moods you want to create in encores, and I’m going to get into that. But first I want to start with a personal reflection for you.

My father, Morton Estrin, had such a profound effect upon me.

I want to talk a little bit about my father’s experiences as a performer. As much as he performed, he got extremely nervous for performances. And when he would walk out on stage, it was a terrifying experience for him! He would get so nervous, his pedal foot would shake. I remember watching him perform and feeling so badly for him. There he was, trying to control things, and his foot was going up and down like crazy! It was once kind of funny, in retrospect. In one of his New York recitals, the reviewer commented on his beautiful performance and his “fluttering pedal technique.” Little did he know it was nothing intentional. It was something my father fought with his whole career. And the way he overcame it was very interesting. For him, the easiest thing to start a program with was something really heroic. He could go out there and play the most bombastic virtuosic music right from the get go. With that, he didn’t have any trouble. But to go out and start a program with a delicate piece, like something of Mozart, or a Schubert Impromptu, was extremely challenging for him. With that very delicate music, any little motion of any part of the body has such profound effects. He worked really hard to overcome this and was proud of himself that he could go out on stage and play something delicate as an opener for a program. Because programmatically, he wanted to be able to have architecture and not just start with the most heroic piece. Usually you want a big finish at the end of your program.

What was interesting about my father’s performances, we would always go backstage at intermission and hug him and tell him how beautiful it sounded. He couldn’t even believe it because he was so terrorized up there for the first half! But in the second half, he would relax. By the time he got to the end of the program, he was in his element. He would play encore after encore and the audience would cheer for more! He would play five, six encores, as many as the audience wanted. And at that point he could do anything. He had no nerves left whatsoever. It was a thrilling experience for everyone who heard him!

There are two different types of encores.

When a program ends and you come out for an encore, the audience has been through a whole program. You want to charge them up! So you play something like a Chopin etude, something virtuosic and energetic. But what if the program ended with something big and dynamic and it’s already a blockbuster at the end of the program? That’s when you want to flip it and come out with a poetic encore, maybe a Chopin Nocturne or Prelude. That could be just the mood you’re looking for.

My father recorded the Scriabin Etudes Opus 8.

It was the first modern recording of the complete Opus 8, and it won record of the year. You can find them on YouTube. His performances don’t sound like etudes. They are rich musical experiences. He didn’t play them as just technical exercises. He played them for the gorgeous music that this early Scriabin is. The Opus 8 was very different from later Scriabin where he explored very sophisticated harmonies that bordered on atonality. Early Scriabin is sometimes compared to Chopin. It really has a voice all its own, but it’s quite chromatic, beautiful romantic music that is extremely emotional. I got to hear my father play them in New York at Lincoln Center. It holds a very special meaning for me.

I’m going to play the D-sharp minor Etude from Opus 8 which is the last of the set. Then, just as if the program ended heroically, because that is an incredible blockbuster piece, I’m going to go right into a movement of Debussy from the Children’s Corner Suite, The Little Shepherd, which was my mother’s favorite piece. I would play it for her as an encore. So this is very special and a personal performance for you. You can listen to the accompanying video. I hope you enjoy it.

Those are two completely different types of encores. What is appropriate depends upon your programming. So remember, if you’ve already pulled out all the stops, and you’ve ended really big, then bring it down and show poetry and express intimate feelings. Show what you can do to the soul! On the other hand, if the program ends with something long and melodic like a Schubert Sonata with beautiful architecture, then you’ll want to charge people up with your encore so they leave the hall with energy. Judging your encores is very important. Sometimes you can even have two or three encores prepared. Or maybe you’re brave enough and you have an audience that’s enthusiastic enough so you can play a bunch of encores like my father used to do!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Thanks again for joining me! 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

www.LivingPianos.com
www.Facebook.com/LivingPianos
949-244-3729

2 Types of Encores – for My Parents – Scriabin: Etude in D# minor Op 8 Debussy: The Little Shepherd

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about the two different kinds of encores. There are fundamentally two different types of moods you want to create in encores, and I’m going to get into that. But fir

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we have a piano quiz! You can take this quiz below. It should be a lot of fun! It’s not very long or very difficult. There are just five questions. I’m going to ask all five questions, then go back and give you the answers. You can see how well you’ve done on this. Also, you can email me and let me know any thoughts you have about these questions.

The first three questions are true or false.

1. If you buy a new Steinway piano, it will go up in value. True or false?

2. Concert pianists practice scales and exercises for many hours every day. True or false?

3. If you see the Yamaha name on a piano, you can be assured that it is a good quality mid-range instrument. True or false?

The next two questions are multiple choice.

4. Why are there repeat signs in music?
A.) They provide performers with flexibility of timing for programming.
B.) It saves paper!
C.) They help composers increase their output without having to do extra work.

5. Ideally, how often should your piano be tuned?
A.) Twice a year is perfect because of seasonal changes.
B.) Having your piano tuned once a month keeps it in tune best.
C.) Your piano should be tuned constantly, every time you play it.

Here are the Answers!

Now we’re going to go back and see how well you did on these questions. Here is the first question, once again:

1. If you buy a new Steinway piano, it will go up in value. True or false? This is a really tough question. If I just had a choice of true or false, I would say true. Now, you might wonder, how can this be? Let’s think about this. My grandfather bought my father a brand new Steinway baby grand in 1939. He paid $900 for it. That same model Steinway now sells for around $80,000. So yes, if you keep it long enough, it’s going to go up in value. But one thing to consider is inflation. Of course, condition is of paramount importance. I rebuilt that particular Steinway of my father’s, so it’s worth quite a bit. But if a Steinway is completely thrashed over the years, if it’s been subjected to the elements, it can have very little value. So, it’s really kind of true or false, depending on the conditions.

Here’s how it can be false. If you buy a brand new Steinway piano, and then just a few years later you want to sell it, you’re going to take a loss because it takes a long time for the yearly increases in the list prices and the sale prices of Steinway pianos to overcome the new versus used value. Like when driving a car off the dealer parking lot, you know that it’s going to lose a tremendous amount of value immediately. The same is true with pianos. But if you keep the piano long enough, the new ones keep going up, so you could be in pretty good shape, provided you take good care of it.

2. Concert pianists practice scales and exercises for many hours every day. True or false? A lot of you are going to be really surprised about this one. The answer is false. You might think concert pianists practice scales, arpeggios and exercises relentlessly. At some point in every concert pianist’s life, they have spent countless hours working on scales, arpeggios, octave exercises, thirds, trills and other technical studies. This goes on for years. But with touring concert pianists, they are so busy learning repertoire. They get such precious little time to practice. So when they’re practicing, they’re going through their programs, their concertos, their chamber music. Sure, they’re going to spend some time with scales, arpeggios and exercises, but the vast amount of the time they spend is rehearsing and practicing for upcoming performances. They don’t have vast amounts of time to practice exercises and scales every day.

3. If you see the Yamaha name on a piano, you can be assured that it is a good quality mid-range instrument. True or false? This is false. Yamaha is a very large music company. In fact, they’re the largest music company in the world! They have pianos on every conceivable level. Most Yamaha pianos you find out there are good mid-range pianos like the U series uprights and CX series grands. They’re good quality pianos for the money with a sweet spot of price and performance, so they’re very popular. But there are also Indonesian-made Yamahas that are entry-level, promotional-level, bare bones instruments. They are well made, of course, but they are far from what I would call fine instruments. On the other end of the spectrum, there are SX and CF series of Yamaha pianos that can be more expensive than Steinways. These instruments are meticulously crafted to the highest possible standards. So, the name Yamaha doesn’t tell you much about the level of piano you’re looking at.

4. Why are there repeat signs in music? Believe it or not, the answer is B.) It saves paper! Now, you might wonder if that’s serious. It is. Here’s the thing about repeat signs. Sometimes you’ll have one edition of a piece with repeats and you’ll have another edition of the same piece with the repeated music printed out in the score. If you saw the repeat notated, you wouldn’t think of leaving it out. But with repeat signs, somehow people get the feeling they are optional. Repeats are an intrinsic part of the composition and composers do it not only to save paper. Think about composers back when they had to write with duck quills. That was no easy task. Anything to save time was a godsend for them. I’m a firm believer in taking repeats. If you find a piece of music where the repeats don’t make sense and it seems too long, consider that maybe your tempo is too slow. The repeats are put in there for good reasons and they make the structure of the piece gel.

5. Ideally, how often should your piano be tuned? I consider twice a year to be the minimum. My father always had his pianos tuned once a month, and yet, by the end of the month they were out of tune. Believe it or not, the answer is C.) Your piano should be tuned constantly every time you play it!

Think about going to a concert featuring a guitar player. Between each song they tune the guitar because it’s going out of tune little by little. Well, so is your piano! It’s just not practical to tune it constantly. At my father’s recording sessions, as well as many other pianists’ recording sessions, the tuner is there. When they hear any notes going out of tune, which can happen at any time, there will be a break in the session, and the tuner will touch-up the few unisons that are out of tune. In a perfect world your piano would be tuned every day! That might be a surprise to some of you, But in recital halls at music conservatories, it’s not unusual for pianos to be tuned daily.

How well did you do? Do any of you have different ideas about these subjects? I know a lot of these questions are subjective in how you answer them. I hope this has been enjoyable for you!

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Piano Quiz – You Can Take the Quiz!

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we have a piano quiz! You can take this quiz below. It should be a lot of fun! It’s not very long or very difficult. There are just five questions. I’m going to ask all five ques

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I want to talk about something that is very dear to my heart. I’ve done quite a number of videos about how to play piano with small hands. My hands are not particularly large, unlike my father Morton Estrin, a phenomenal concert pianist who had immense hands. I had to learn how to get a big sound with smaller hands. Today’s question is, “Can You Stretch Your Hands for the Piano?”

When I was a teenager, my father thought that maybe it would be helpful for me to stretch my hands. So I started doing stretching exercises. Nothing that would possibly injure, of course. I tried to get more of a straight line from the thumb to the pinky instead of arching out the hands. And I learned that you can’t do it by going straight, but if you arch up a little bit, you can get a bigger reach. So on the outside of the keys I could just barely hit a 10th.

Strength is the answer!

I’m not sure that those stretches did any good. I’d work on them in various ways, but ultimately I found that when I developed more strength at the piano, I was able to negotiate bigger leaps. And, as I’ve talked about before, you can play broken chords very quickly with the pedal in order to play chords way beyond your reach with security. You can work on arpeggios, scales, and repertoire, and through practice you will strengthen your hands to be able to achieve the sound you are after. So, strength is the answer more so than stretching.

I’m very curious to hear from all of you out there. Is there anybody who has any experience with this or has tried stretching and it’s worked? I’m not saying stretching is a bad idea, I’m just saying that it didn’t increase my reach. There are other possible benefits to stretching.

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact us with any piano related questions for future videos!

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Can You Stretch Your Hands For the Piano?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I want to talk about something that is very dear to my heart. I’ve done quite a number of videos about how to play piano with small hands. My hands are not particularly large, unlike m

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to share with you three tips for practicing scales. I’ve made quite a few videos about scales. But, Truth be known, I spend a minimal amount of time practicing scales to achieve the desired results, which is to have clean finger work, and to have mastered all the fingering of all major and minor scales and arpeggios. However, no matter how far you go with scales you can always go further. It’s endless what you can do with scales! Today I’m going to give you three tips to improve your scales. Maybe you’ve gotten in a rut. You’ve practiced your scales and you don’t know where to go next. Maybe you’re not totally happy with your finger work and you’re wondering, is there any other way to practice scales that will help to clean up your technique? Here are three techniques you can try. First of all, most of us practice scales just going up and down the piano in four octaves, an octave apart, as referenced in Hanon’s 60 Selected Exercises for the Virtuoso Pianist. That is a prerequisite for developing a good technique on the piano, particularly for playing classical styles or anything that’s technically oriented. It’s kind of like having a bag of tricks in your back pocket that’s always there when you need it, because you have scales in music pretty much all the time, in one way or another. So, what about practicing with different articulations or phrasings?

Instead of playing all legato, you could play with detached fingers in a staccato manner.

The reason this practice technique is so incredibly important is that the evenness from note to note isn’t just about the down strike of the key, but the release of each key as well. If you were to slow down a sloppy scale performance, you might hear that notes are striking together, but some notes are holding longer than others. You’ll hear haphazard lengths of notes, most likely where the thumb or finger crossings happen. By playing in a staccato manner you can hear things more clearly. You can play with staccato fingers, or the notes can have a little bit more length than that, and still be detached. Not really staccato fingers, but not smooth and connected the way you might think of playing scales usually.

Play one hand legato and one hand staccato.

In a recent video, I talked about how playing the hands two octaves apart when practicing scales can help you to hear things better. Well, here’s another tip for you. Play one hand legato and one hand staccato. This technique really allows you to hear what’s happening. Try playing the right hand legato and the left hand staccato. This can be reversed, playing the left hand legato and right hand staccato. This is just the tip of the iceberg! You can try this technique with two-note slurs or four-note slurs as well. And you could start on the second note of the scale and do the same thing. The whole idea is that it helps you to identify where the hands play together. It solidifies your scales in a way that just playing them the same way over and over again will never achieve for you. It could be a tremendous time-saver. So, what are some other ideas? That’s just one of three tips I’m giving you today. This can keep you busy for the next six months!

Do what solves problems.

The trick is not necessarily to do every articulation on every scale. If you find you have an unevenness in an F major scale descending scale, focus on that and start working on various techniques that solve that problem on that scale. Then you’ll find that this technique will translate from one scale to other scales.

Put your scales into a musical context.

We’re all used to playing scales loud, soft, medium. What about playing scales very, very loud? Or perhaps very delicately. You can play one hand loud and one hand soft, but it doesn’t just have to be that. You could make a crescendo up, a crescendo down, or you could start at the bottom loud and make a decrescendo all the way up and all the way down. The key is not to look at scales as an abstraction completely, but to put it into a musical context. After all, when you play music you’re not playing everything straight. So, you can explore this with your scales and make them more interesting and more musical. Always strive for a beautiful sound at the piano. This is really important in your music, anyway. You can also do all these techniques or many of these techniques with your arpeggios.

Play your scales at different speeds.

I am a firm believer in playing scales to a metronome. It’s very important that you practice your scales slowly and get progressively faster, increasing the speed of the metronome one or two notches at a time. This is what assures really clean, even scales. This is an incredibly useful technique. There’s no substitute for that sort of practice!

These are some musical things you can do with scales at home to enhance your technique on the piano. I hope this is helpful for you! Let me know how these tips work out for you and feel free to contact me with suggestions for future videos! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

3 Tips For Practicing Scales

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to share with you three tips for practicing scales. I’ve made quite a few videos about scales. But, Truth be known, I spend a minimal amount of time practicing scales t

This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. The question today is, “Should You Practice Scales in Contrary Motion?” What does that even mean? Contrary motion is where your hands play in opposite directions from one another. How can you play in contrary motion? Wouldn’t your hands overlap? I’ll explain the value and we’ll talk about whether this is something important for you to practice on the piano. You can go through your scales up and down as you normally would in four octaves. Then, the hands go in opposite directions! Now, why would you ever want to do that? Is this written in music? Not very often.

The reason for this is to hear the independence of the hands more clearly.

When you’re playing hands together, whether the hands are precisely together or not is hard for you to hear because you’re playing the same notes in both hands. But when they start going in opposite directions, you can really hear better. Not only that, but your hands can then develop the ability to play independently from one another. You can really hone in your scale technique this way. So, of course learning all your major and minor scales and arpeggios is a very important skillset to have in your back pocket, particularly if you’re a classical pianist. But for any type of pianist, I think it’s incredibly valuable. Once you can do that, as well as scales in intervals of thirds, sixths and tenths, there’s no end to what can be done with scales.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the end all is scales, arpeggios and exercises.

Nothing could be further from the truth! It’s important to remember that the whole reason for exercises is in service of the music so that you can play repertoire on a high level. So spend only the time necessary playing scales to hone in your technique and devote most of your practice time to music. It’s more enjoyable and rewarding and you’ll get more out of it. At the end of the day, you’ll have music you can play! So put a fraction of your time into scales, arpeggios and exercises, but the majority of your time into learning and refining music. You will be richly rewarded!

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos.

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Should You Practice Scales in Contrary Motion?

This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. The question today is, “Should You Practice Scales in Contrary Motion?” What does that even mean? Contrary motion is where your hands play in opposite directions from one another. How can you pla

I’m Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com. Today’s topic is, “The Secrets of Interlocking Octaves on the Piano.” What are interlocking octaves? It’s a great technique that creates a dazzling sound and it’s actually easier than it sounds! It’s always nice to have something that sounds hard but isn’t all that hard to play.

A good example of this is the end of the B-minor scherzo of Chopin. There’s a chromatic scale that goes all the way up the piano. But some people like to play interlocking octaves instead of just a simple chromatic scale. How do you do that? I’m going to show you the trick to it. It’s so easy!

Interlocking octaves are easier to play than the chromatic scale and it sounds very impressive.

Even though Chopin didn’t compose this section in octaves, a lot of pianists play it that way. I like to play it with interlocking octaves. It caps off the finale of this incredibly energetic piece – a final burst of musical energy. So how is this done? First of all, you have to know how to play octaves. I have other videos on that subject. You can click here to check it out:

THE BEST PIANO EXERCISES (PART 4) – OCTAVES

To play a chromatic scale with two hands interlocking, each hand is playing a whole tone scale.

A chromatic scale is every single key on the piano, black and white next to each other, while a whole tone scale is every other key on the piano. So, the left hand plays a whole tone scale and the right hand plays the other notes of the chromatic scale, creating another whole tone scale. That’s the way it works. And when you put them together, indeed your thumbs are playing a chromatic scale. So there’s a chromatic scale with the thumbs. Just add the pinkies and you have interlocking octaves. That’s the secret to interlocking octaves!

If you can play octaves, interlocking octaves are a piece of cake. And as I said, they sound very impressive. It’s a virtuoso sound that doesn’t take virtuoso technique – just good octave technique. You too can play interlocking octaves like at the end of the Chopin B-minor scherzo. I hope this has been helpful for you. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

The Secrets of Interlocking Octaves on the Piano

I’m Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com. Today’s topic is, “The Secrets of Interlocking Octaves on the Piano.” What are interlocking octaves? It’s a great technique that creates a dazzling sound and it’s actually e