Tag Archives: piano

Student of Robert Estrin: Bijan Taghavi – Jazz Artist

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. I am so pleased to have a special guest today, Bijan Taghavi! Bijan was a student of mine from the time he was eight years old until after high school, when he went to the Manhattan School of Music as a piano major. He studied classical music, played concertos, and accompanied metropolitan opera singers, but all along, he also played other styles of music. I’m proud to announce that:

He is coming out with his second album with his trio, TrioGram!

Robert: Welcome, Bijan!

Bijan: Thanks for having me, Bob. I’m so happy to be here.

Robert: So tell me the latest. What’s going on with you? Then we’ll start from the beginning and talk about your metamorphosis in music. I’m sure everybody’s interested in this.

Bijan: I’m actually in town visiting Cleveland now because I’m playing at the Treelawn, which is a new jazz club. They got their piano from you, actually. It’s literally a two-minute walk from here in the Waterloo Arts District in Cleveland. So I’m going to be playing here, and then we’re off to Europe for a tour for our first album, which came out a few months ago. And then, pretty soon thereafter, we’re going to be going to L.A. to do our second TrioGram album. It’s a jazz piano trio with myself, led by my friend, the great bassist Will Lyle. We’re going to have a special guest drummer who played with the Bill Evans Trio: Joe LaBarbera. So I’m so excited about that. It’s going to be great!

Robert: That’s really exciting! This is your second European tour, is that right?

Bijan: It’s my second international tour. I did a Bijan Taghavi Trio tour back in 2018 in Japan, which, by the way, has an incredibly vibrant… I was going to say music scene, but it’s actually a perfect situation where the musicians aren’t necessarily as great as they are here, but the audiences actually love jazz over there, so it’s a perfect problem. There’s more demand than supply! So when we go there, they absolutely love it. The venues are packed, and it’s a lot of fun.

Robert: Fantastic!

You’re teaching at Hillsdale College.

We could talk a little bit about your academic background, but I think people would be really interested in how you started off in classical, but from the very beginning, you’d come in with blues and Elton John tunes. I always worked with you on these other styles, but you were spearheading major concertos by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, and then suddenly you had a pivotal event that shifted everything. Talk about the difference between classical and jazz. What was it like for you to make that shift? How did this happen?

Bijan: When I switched to studying with you, that was really when I became serious with the piano. Before that, I had just gone to the Yamaha School of Music. I was there for maybe five years or something. I started when I was three and a half. Elton John was actually my inspiration, so that’s probably why later on, when I first started venturing outside of classical music, I started just exploring with some Elton John tunes. But then I went to a performance of yours, and do you remember where I sat in relation to you?

Robert: Yes, yes. This was very early on, and you were just a little kid. I was playing a private concert in a beautiful home in Huntington Beach, and this little kid came over and sat with his head right on the edge of the keyboard! I said, “Can you go to the other side?” Because you were blocking the audience!

Bijan: Completely blocking the audience!

Robert: The entire performance, you were just riveted! For such a young kid, that was really pretty shocking! Then I heard you play, and I could hear that, you know, even though you were elementary, you had a lot of talent and so much enthusiasm. I always enjoyed working with you. The interesting thing was that, from the very beginning, you’d spend your allowance money on sheet music. Not many kids do that!

Bijan: At the time, I remember you weren’t taking students, or at least that’s what you said. Maybe you just didn’t want to take the elementary level first. But then, once you heard that I was spending my allowance on sheet music, that showed you that I was really committed to doing something with the piano, whether it was professional or not, and that I was taking it seriously. You know,

Studying with you—it’s not hyperbole to say it really changed my life in terms of my trajectory.

First of all, with the piano, I figured out how to practice, which I’m sure people who watch your YouTube channel know is a big concept that you emphasize in your lessons and everything. I learned everything I know about how to play the piano, piano technique, how to get a good sound out of the piano, piano tone, etc., from you. I did all those main classical works, as far as even playing solo piano concerts at your old Art District Concert series.

You even prepared me to play the Grieg Piano Concerto with the South Coast Symphony.

But then I made the transition. It was really sort of two main catalyst events for me that made me switch. The first thing was that I had a concert with a Latin jazz flutist, Néstor Torres. That was the first true sort of jazz experience that I ever had. At that time, even though I had spent, like you said, some allowance money on rock songs, Billy Joel, Elton John, and a little bit of blues, I didn’t really know how to read chord charts. So that was the craziest thing for me to look at. They were looking for a jazz pianist out of the high school group because he came to our high school, and I just said I could play jazz piano. Then I was handed, over the summer, this stack of like 20 lead sheets. Now it might be easy for me because I’m so used to that, but at the time, reading a lead sheet was like the craziest thing. I didn’t even know what I was looking at!

Robert: I remember you coming into your lesson with this book. We had done some theory, but to realize an entire concert’s worth of lead sheets? There’s no way there would be time during a lesson! We just scratched the surface, but somehow you assimilated all those scores! And that was when you were still in high school.

Bijan: Yeah, I was still in high school. My guitar teacher, who also helped me a lot in making the transition, gave me this sort of cheat sheet that had every single chord on it. And there were unnecessary chords too. It was like maybe a stack of like 25 chords written on this page. It had the chord, and then it had the formula. I didn’t really understand how there are only four chord families, and you don’t need that list of 25, but I went through each chord methodically in the lead sheet and figured out what the chords are. So it was a lot of work. But I sort of temporarily quit my foray into jazz after that. In retrospect, Néstor was right. He told me something that sort of depressed me a little bit about the possibility. He said, “Look, kid, you’ve got a long way to go.” Particularly with my improvisation and things like that, because I didn’t have much jazz language then, even though I was experimenting with things. That’s an area where you were really encouraging to me. I’m indebted to you forever for that. You encouraged me to keep going and to explore more and more.

The second catalyst for me was when I heard the great late pianist Oscar Peterson. When I first transitioned to jazz, I didn’t have a jazz teacher for the longest time. You would help me out a lot, but:

I didn’t study with a jazz teacher until I went to the Manhattan School of Music later.

So I had sort of a year-long period where it was really just Oscar Peterson. I actually didn’t like jazz, which is the funniest thing. Some of the greatest jazz pianists like Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner, for me, my ears weren’t even ready for that. But I was lucky enough that Oscar was able to draw me in. Now I can appreciate all those artists, and I’ve taken so much from those other pianists as well. But those were the main two catalysts for me.

Robert: With all my students, I give a solid background in the three macro skills of memorization, sight reading, and improvisation. One of the things I do from the earliest stages is just have students play a very simple chord progression. First, I will go on one side of the piano and comp and let the student play all white keys. I’ll do a Dorian mode. Then I’ll switch it and let the student comp (and I solo). Then I say, “Okay, now the hard part. See if you can comp with your left hand and solo with the right hand.” And there are varying degrees of success. Sometimes people just start playing methodically up the keyboard, one note at a time. I’ll say, “Hold some notes longer than others,” to try to get some variety. But right from the very first time you did it; I couldn’t believe you were able to do it the first time you tried! That’s when I realized that you had an incredible affinity for this. The other thing was your sense of rhythm with popular styles. You had a great groove, even as the youngest kid, in addition to being able to play Beethoven and Chopin scherzos and all of that.

But getting back to TrioGram, what is the whole concept of TrioGram? On your albums, It’s all original music. How much of it is yours? Tell us a bit more about your trio.

Bijan: Yeah, it’s a lot of original music. TrioGram is an association of myself and one of my best friends, Will Lyle, a great bass player. We’re both from Southern California, actually, although we never met there. We met afterwards when we were both in college, and we found out we’re both from there. But he and I had worked a lot together in the past, and we always meant to do a project together. We thought, what better way than to do a piano trio? First of all, as a pianist, a piano trio is one of the premier settings to feature a jazz pianist because you’re in control of everything. You’re playing the melodies; you’re the main soloist instrument, although the bassist can solo as well. So it really features the pianist. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also kind of intimidating at the same time. But it was this project that he and I put together. Basically, it was just the end of last summer in 2022. We were both incredibly busy, but we thought, let’s do a record together at the end of a month. So we only gave ourselves a month. Naturally, he and I both got busy. I’m doing a lot of work in Michigan, and he’s doing a lot of work in New York. But our drummer mistakenly thought we were still going on with the project even though we had decided to stop it. He just did this little post on Facebook. He said, “Hey guys, I’m going to be in town doing this recording session.” I was like, “Hey, Will, did you not tell Kofi that we’re not going to be doing this anymore?” Then we talked about it and decided that maybe we should go ahead and do it. So it was really put together at the last minute. We decided the tunes last minute, and we wrote the tunes last minute, but it turned out a lot better than we expected. It was great. We did a lot of original music. He did some original tunes, and

I did some original tunes, one of which was dedicated to you, actually. It’s called “Changes.”

Robert: A great tune, by the way. We’ll have links for you so you can check out some of Bijan’s music.

The last thing I want to ask about is your upcoming album. You’ve got another drummer featuring on this album. Tell us about that, because that’s a really exciting development.

Bijan: After we did the first record, Will and I did a series of tours. We did one on the West Coast, where we went to Mexico and did a series of shows there with incredible audiences. They were so supportive of our music. Then we went to California and Arizona. In California, we had featured special guest drummers with us, and in L.A., we played with the great drummer Joe LaBarbera, who was one of the drummers for the iconic Bill Evans trio. We had the rehearsal, and I’m really picky with musicians and drummers because there’s a very particular thing that I want, and Will is the same way. But after the rehearsal, he and I went outside, and we just started dancing like a bunch of old Iranian women! We were celebrating! It was the most incredible thing. I had never played with a drummer where I felt so good and comfortable. He knew how to support you and play under you, and the sound he gets out of the instrument, I could go on forever. His time feel is just so incredible! We have another tour coming up.

We’re going to be playing with Joe LaBarbera in California, in
San Francisco on July 26 at the Black Cat and on July 27th at Campus Jack’s Jazz Club in Orange County.

And we thought, since we’re doing these gigs with them and we’re going to be in California, let’s do another record with him. So we’re going to be doing another album with Joe LaBarbera, and I’m so excited for it.

Robert: Well, we’ll have links to your website, and once again, it’s great having you here! I know you’ve got to get to your gig up the street in about 5 minutes.

Bijan: I’m going to change and run over there!

Robert: Thanks again for coming. And once again, I’m Robert Estrin, this is LivingPianos.com.

Bijan: Thank you, Bob.

You can find Bijan’s music and tour dates at BijanTaghavi.com.

Thanks again 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

How to Orchestrate Your Playing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how dynamics are like orchestration in your music. The piano is an amazing instrument because you have all the parts of a whole orchestra right under your fingertips! You want to think of your playing as orchestrating the sound and getting the quality of different sections of an orchestra—the strings, the brass, the percussion, all of it.

Thinking of your playing as different sections of an orchestra will help you play more expressively.

It can be richly rewarding for your audience to hear these kinds of dramatic changes in dynamics and tonal colors. I’m going to demonstrate this by using the beginning of Mozart’s Sonata in C Minor, K 457. This is a really good example because of the stark changes in dynamics. You can imagine the opening statement as a full orchestra with big, booming strings and brass. The next part is much quieter, so maybe you just have woodwinds. Then again, a full orchestra, followed again by delicate winds. Think of your music as orchestrating each section. Get a different tonal color and a different balance in your playing.

Whenever you’re playing, think of orchestrating.

This goes for every composition you play! Some can be more subtle than others. Not all music is going to change this often from one texture, sound, or dynamic to another. However, this also holds true when you’re playing a texture. This isn’t changing orchestrations for each bar or measure, but having a different sound for each strata of music. The treble might be a clarinet; the lower notes could be cellos; and in the middle, it could be violas. So you try to get different sounds on all the different lines you’re playing.

There are two kinds of orchestration.

There’s orchestrating different sections dynamically, and there’s orchestrating which lines of music you’re bringing out. Think of your piano music as being orchestrated, because after all, that’s exactly what the piano offers! That’s what’s so great about the piano—you can play compositions that would take a whole orchestra. Take advantage of that and discover the sounds and sonorities you can achieve in your playing! I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again 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

All Beats are NOT Created Equal

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how all beats are not created equal. This almost sounds like blasphemy, but it’s absolutely true! What am I talking about here? Well, it depends upon the nature of a piece of music, the time signature, the period style, and so many other things.

There are different types of emphasis within a time signature.

Even in 4/4 time, the beats are not always evenly emphasized. Instead of a monotonous sequence of one – two – three – four, the emphasis can shift and create rhythmic diversity. Oftentimes, the “1” is the strongest beat, the “3” is the second strongest beat, and the “4” is the weakest beat. By playing with emphasis on the “1” and “3,” you get a more elegant sound.

There are many dance forms in music, and they are a great way to demonstrate this concept.

What better way to show how beats are not equal than in a dance movement? When people are moving to music, they’re making different motions depending upon what beat is playing. A waltz, for example, Chopin’s B minor Waltz, is in 3/4 time as all waltzes are. The “1” is the strongest beat, and the “3” is the second strongest beat. Just imagine a ballroom filled with people dancing the waltz. The “1” is the big motion, and the “3” is the second biggest motion, bringing it back to the “1.” This can help you intrinsically understand the idea that not all beats are created equal watching the motion of dancers. Some beats involve more movement than others.

Interestingly, other pieces in 3/4 time have different emphasis.

For example, in the famous Mozart C Major Sonata K545, the second movement is in 3/4 time. There is a little bit of emphasis on the one, but not like a waltz. Another example of this is the last movement of Mozart’s C Minor Sonata K457. This one is faster, like the Chopin waltz, but with a completely different emphasis of beats. It’s really two-measure phrases with emphasis on the first beat of every two measures! So beats aren’t created equal, not just in emphasis, but even in the amount of time they get, to some extent.

There’s a certain style to dance movements in particular that creates energy and emotion.

This is true of just about all music. It’s very unusual to have a piece where all the beats are exactly the same. It’s a rare quality in music. It’s akin to your speech. When you’re speaking, your intonation isn’t the same for all words. You have natural emphasis for some words. It’s the same with music. So start thinking about where the strong beats are in your music. Usually “1” is the strongest beat in most music, but even that is not always true. You will discover this as you experiment with your music trying to feel where the strong beats are!

Thanks again 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

What Makes a Piano Great?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question is: What makes a piano great? I have come across thousands of pianos in my life. I literally grew up with pianos. We had four pianos in our home growing up because my father, Morton Estrin, was a concert pianist and a Baldwin artist at that. We had three Baldwins at one time, a Steinway, a Sohmer; we had different pianos at different times, but I grew up with all of those pianos. I got to try out my dad’s pianos before recitals at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. During his recording sessions, whenever he took breaks, I’d play these magnificent instruments that were prepared to such a high level.

I started selling pianos after graduating from music conservatory.

I was teaching piano, and so many people calling me for lessons didn’t own pianos! The first question I would ask is, “Do you own a piano?” Half the time, people would say, “No.” I would tell them they were better off with a piano and no lessons than with lessons and no piano. How can you learn if you don’t have an instrument to play? So I wouldn’t take students who didn’t have pianos, but I was losing out trying to start my career. That’s why I started seeking out inexpensive pianos that were worthy of restoration, mostly big, tall, old uprights, consoles, and spinets. The need for that has been so great that, my entire life, I’ve always had pianos in my home, at one time a large live/work loft, and have had piano stores as well. I’ve always literally lived with pianos!

I have a real perspective on what makes a great piano.

I’m going to share some tips with you. If you’re looking at pianos, you may wonder if the one you’re looking at is worthwhile. Well, of course, there’s a lot to that subject, and condition is of paramount importance. But what I’m talking about is not really the condition of the piano. Sometimes, we take in pianos that need complete rebuilding, which can take six months to a year! Yet some of them are good candidates, because I can tell the seeds of greatness are in there. Many just don’t have much potential and aren’t worth rebuilding.

How do you know if a piano has the potential to be great?

First of all, the condition of a piano has to be such that you can tell what it sounds like, unless you’re an expert who has vast experience with pianos. If it hasn’t been tuned in ten years and the strings are rusty, you might have no idea if it has any kind of potential at all. But I have an interesting story for you. A few years ago, I had a repeat engagement with the Piano Teachers Association. On stage, they had two brand new nine-foot concert grand pianos. I sat down at one, and it was an absolute dream. The other piano was nothing special. It really didn’t have the magic. So what is that magic? What makes one piano a gem and another one not so great?

Even with brand new pianos, some have more potential than others.

Piano soundboards are hand-built. Even though there are specifications for how they’re built, no two trees are the same. Every soundboard is unique! They are usually tapered on the edges, and they’re built with an arch in the middle, referred to as crown. You can measure crown, but that’s not going to tell you very much. You can run a string under the soundboard to see if there’s a little gap in the middle to check if it has that arch, but the tone of the piano is the way you can tell how good the crown of a soundboard is.

A large old piano might have a thunderous bass, but it’s in the treble that you most often lose the sustain of the tone.

Sometimes a piano will have good sustain in one register but may be lacking in another. By simply playing single notes with no pedal, you may be able to tell the potential of a piano. My personal piano is a late 1930s Steinway S, the smallest baby grand Steinway makes. My grandfather bought this piano for my father, and we rebuilt it a number of years ago. It has the original soundboard without even a hairline crack in it! That is very lucky, since this piano has grown up in a number of environments, yet it has pretty amazing sustain and projection. Listening to a single note with no pedal, you can hear how long the tone sustains. When you get to the really high register, that’s where a lot of pianos really lose it.

There are all sorts of techniques that can be employed to try to increase the sustain of the tone. First of all, you can restring a piano if the strings are old and tired. Just tapping down the strings at the point of termination at the bridges to get good, clean contact from the metal to the bridge can really help. But if you play note to note and none of them have really good sustain, you’re probably not going to get very good results. If you find some of the notes have good sustain and others don’t, there’s hope!

In the middle register on a great piano, the sound of the notes seems to almost get bigger after the initial attack.

You can hear how notes in the middle register open up after the initial attack. That is a sign of a great piano. If you have that in all registers, you’re in great shape. Now, if you’re looking at a piano you may want to buy that has not been prepped and you’re wondering what potential it has, listen to several different notes in various registers. If a good number of the notes have that quality of sound, the piano may be worth restoring. But if you have a whole register that is lacking in that expansiveness of tone and sustain, you’re probably never going to get great results out of it. Sometimes you can replace a soundboard and bring that vibrant life back to a piano; however, that’s very expensive because it involves rebuilding the whole piano. Just the soundboard can cost in excess of $10,000!

That’s how you can determine if a piano is great!

Obviously, a great piano is one that has the potential, has had the work done, and is in magnificent condition inside and out. If you have that, you have the ultimate piano! I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again 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

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

Why Not Playing is Practicing

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about repetition in your piano practice. Repetition is an essential part of piano practice, but did you know that the essential element of repetition is not the repetition itself? It’s the time between the repetitions. All too often, I’ve seen students fall into a trap. If you don’t take the essential time between each repetition, you can fall into an endless loop of missing things over and over again, essentially practicing playing badly. That’s what you want to avoid!

There are myriad ways you can practice.

I would suggest practicing slowly. You can turn the metronome on at a comfortable speed, and do progressively faster metronome speeds. You can work on note groups. You can do rhythms. You can do so many things! But that’s not what I’m showing you today. I’m showing you how to deal specifically with just repeating something until you get it right, which I’m sure all of you do on a regular basis in your practice. But you have to remember that the repetition is not where the value comes in.

The time between the repetitions is the practicing; the playing of the passage is not the practicing.

The playing is only a check of your work. The work happens in your head between each repetition. So if you play, and something isn’t clean, identifying the correction is number one. Find where the correction is. Focus your attention on the correction, and then you can come up with a strategy for cementing it. You want to find a spot to start just before it so you can repeat the correction. Once you get the correction solidified, go back and see if you can put it into context by starting at the beginning of the passage. Each time you play it, take a moment to think about what you just played. If it comes out absolutely perfectly, see if you can repeat it perfectly again. If there’s anything that isn’t quite right, identify the specific correction before you repeat it. This is essential. Each time you play it, stop and think about what you just heard.

Take the time between repetitions to mentally study what you just played.

Find the correction in the score, then implement the correction by starting strategically at the exact right spot before it at the beginning of the phrase. You don’t want to start right on the correction. However, initially, just to know what the correction is, you might play the notes you are having trouble with, but then find where you can start just before it. You have to be able to get into it in the context of the piece. You want to find the closest spot before the correction to start from. You can either land on that note or land right after that note, then cement it and go back. Initially, you may even want to stop just before the correction, then play the correction so you are sure to play it accurately from the get go. With each repetition, you must analyze your work and think about what you want to accomplish. If you fall into mindless repetition, where you are just repeating things without listening to what you did and coming up with a strategy to improve it, you are not practicing at that moment.

Remember, practicing is a thought process!

Playing is not practicing! It’s the analysis of what you’ve played that is going to improve your playing. That’s the lesson for today! If you have any questions, you can ask them in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again 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

Can You Make a Crescendo on a Chord on the Piano?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question is: Can you make a crescendo on a chord on the piano? How many of you have seen a held chord with a crescendo on it in your score? How can you possibly do something like that? Did the composer not understand the physics of the piano, or were they just crazy?! Why would they ever write a crescendo on a held chord? Well, there are some very good compositional reasons for this, and I’m going to show you how you can achieve the effect of a crescendo on a chord on the piano!

Sometimes you will see a crescendo on a held chord in your score.

As an example of this, I’ve pulled up Grieg’s Lyric Pieces. In the third one, called Watchman’s Song, near the very end, there is a held chord with a crescendo on it. What is meant by that crescendo? Well, the composer is trying to show you that this phrase is not ending gently. It’s moving forward. There are some things you can do to achieve this effect; one way is with the use of the sustain pedal.

The sustain pedal can create the sense of a crescendo on a held chord.

When you use the pedal on a chord, you get a little bit of a sense of growth in the sound as all the other strings of the piano can resonate because the dampers are lifted. When you play it and gently move forward right at that point, you almost get the sense of a crescendo. You can play the chord a little bit louder in anticipation of the crescendo, pedaling very soon after the initial attack to get more of a booming sound. Whereas usually the way to pedal chords is to pedal just as the chord starts fading away to mitigate the dying away of the chord thereby increasing the sustain. But when you’re trying to get a downright crescendo, put the pedal down very soon after the initial attack. Your attack should be stronger than it would be without a crescendo. Keep things moving forward, almost anticipating the next chord to try to get the sense of a crescendo.

Indeed, you can get the effect of a crescendo on a chord!

Even though physically it’s not really possible, you can get the effect of a crescendo by utilizing the pedal, anticipating the crescendo a little bit early, and letting the music move along through the crescendo. That’s what the composer intended. They weren’t out of their minds. It wasn’t like they didn’t understand the physics of the sound of a piano. I’m sure Grieg understood! You can hear the effect that it creates when you follow the composer’s intentions. After all, the piano is an instrument of illusion. There’s so much we do with the piano that you wouldn’t think is possible. Just getting a singing line out of a percussion instrument, where every note is dying away, is a huge challenge. So this is what you must do. Think of what the composer intended and find a way to achieve it with the way you approach the music and how you apply the pedal. I hope this has been helpful for you! Thanks again 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