A Few Questions

Dear mr Fraser, I'm a pianist from the Netherlands and came to this forum after seeing the demo of your DVD which looks really intersting. I had a few questions for you, -What do you think of daily scale & arpeggio practice? -What do you think of Murray Perahia's playing and technique? -What would you think of the way I sit at the piano etc after a picture on my website? Thank you very much! Nicolas

Dear Nicholas, Thanks so much for your questions. Judging from your photo, you may well be our youngest contributing member, and we do welcome you to the Forum! Rachmaninoff swore by scales and arpeggios and said that they were the basis of his entire technique. He practiced them religiously all his life. I do not, although if I had the time I think I would. It all depends on how you do them. Done mechanistically and without sensitivity (both physical and musical), scales can dull your perceptions and ruin your playing. Done well, they can train and hone reflexes that, let's face it, need to be kept in top form. Keeping those reflexes in form by doing scales keeps your musical perceptions fresh for when you want to work on repertoire, and gives you a pianistic mechanism that is already prepared to fulfill your musical intentions, reducing the time you must spend solving each individual technical problem that various passages in the repertoire present. I myself follow an alternate path: I work to keep my reflexes honed and hyper-sensitive in everything I do at the keyboard - I don't reduce my physical awareness when I increase my musical awareness. The two work in tandem. With all my obligations I don't have that much time to spend at the piano, so I do not exhaust my reflexive energy in scales & arps but go directly to my repertoire while my reflexes are still pristine and fresh. In your shoes I would probably try to do a lot of scales & arps and get your automatism as well-trained as possible. I have heard Murray Perahia play extremely beautifully, I remember in particular one Schubert Impromptu he played as an encore in Montreal just a week after he was married (many years ago!) which was incredibly tender and ethereal - such a personal utterance! I also remember being dissatisfied with his technique. I also remember another Schubert performance, a recording that I heard on the radio that was so conventional and lacking in real emotion that it disappointed me. It's a very interesting case and bears some discussion. I felt that his sound was shallow, and his physical technique reflected this. I don't quite know how to describe it: he wasn't exactly doing anything colour, and sometimes his musicality bored me - I found it too standard, too 'nice' but nothing more. Then he started studying with Horowitz, and his sound really developed some beef - more masculinity, more richness, more orchestration, more differentiation. I remember a Chopin E minor concerto with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic where you could really hear the influence of the master - a nice surprise and a nice evolution in Murray's playing. Then he hurt himself. I suspect that these three things are related. I believe that he discovered what sounds he needed to make by following Horowitz's example, but he did not develop his hand enough to withstand the new stresses the musical demands were now making on it. The original visual impression I had of his hand: like I said, nothing really wrong but it wasn't either. I think this means that although his arch wasn't collapsed, it wasn't as pronounced as it would need to be either - not strong enough to support the greater forces now going down through the skeletal frame. Which brings me to your third question: your posture looks pretty good, both in your body and your hands on key. When will you put some videos on YouTube so I can get a more detailed impression? Thanks again for your post, AFF

Dear mr. Fraser, Thank you so much for your quick reply and excuse me for my VERY slow reply. You have some good points on scales & arpeggios. How would recommend one to practice them? I do them this way: Scales all keys major, minor, harmonic, melodic. -4 octaves up, -2 octaves down, -2 octaves contrary motion(down-up) -2 octaves down. Arpeggios all keys major, minor, diminished 7th and dominant 7th -4 octaves up, -2 octaves down, -2 octaves contrary motion(down-up) -2 octaves down. I also practice thirds and chromatic octaves alternated since i'm studying a liszt etude. Before I would do 20 hanons before all this, but I stopped doing this because it became boring and didn't see that it was really helping me anymore. A pianist called Derek Han told me to do all of this. He has been doing this every moring for over 20 years!!! I'm really a big Perahia fan and I remember asking him about this scale en arpeggio thing. He said that he did them a lot when he was young but he finds it boring now. I actually never heard him play live in his pre -horowitz period, because I wasn't even born then!! haha. But the concerts I heard in the Concertgebouw where amazing. I think I'll put some videos on YouTube, since I recorded a DVD some weeks ago, but I still have to figure out how to do it. Well thanks again for your post! Nicolas. P.S. I heard Nelson Freire yesterday @ the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. I think he has the most relaxed technique, what do you think?

You can play whatever scales you like, it doesn't matter which ones or how many - it matters HOW you do them! Do you use your hand in an evolved, differentiated way that respects it innate structure and function? Do you cultivate the development of new ability every time you try one? Are you mechanically repeating or do you use to demand ever finer tonal nuances and beauty from your fingers? Then there is the question of evaluating the playing of such great pianists as Perahia or Freire: these men are wonderful artists who have reached the pinnacle of pianistic ability. But take their best playing of some piece, let's say the Chopin B minor Scherzo as Freire was playing parts of that at the opening of the documentary, and compare it with Horowitz's. Not to do some ego trip like he was so much greater than them, but to ask the simple question, what is possible? And to open our ears and our eyes and our senses and our understanding to see if we can strive not to imitate Horowitz but to understand the piano and music in a way that opens up these realms of richer tonal control that serves a more profound musicianship. Horowitz was first and foremost a great musician - he played with . His sound and his musical expression make everyone else sound like a student because of his musical conception first and foremost. His inner ear heard more in the music than most of us do. Let us not imitate his sound externally but try to discover the inner mental-emotional process that led to his interpretations. Perahia and Freire are established artists. They play the way they play, and it is fine. Indeed, Perahia demonstrated that even late in his career he could evolve to a whole new level, which is really an amazing accomplishment. But you are still young. NOW is the time to set the sky as the limit, and to push yourself as far as you can towards a really individual style of playing. Of course, you need chops, you need fingers that fly and a sound that sings and roars and whispers. But what are you expressing on a level with all that? How much do you delve into the lives and emotions of the composers whose works you play? How much do you know about the architectonic structure of a piece and all the myriad ways to sculpt the phrases to bring that structure to life in a performance? When you make greater dramatic demands on yourself, then you will see what greater tonal resources are needed to express all that, and you will find your hand developing in a completely unexpected way to fulfill those tonal demands... Now is the time! AFF