stephen hough's practice tips

7/28/2019 Stephen Hough's Practice Tips

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Pianists and their teachers tend either to advocate practising in rhythms with an evangelicalfervour, or to maintain that it's a total waste of time. All I can say is that, done correctly, I havefound it useful throughout my life for certain passages. Very rarely do I use dotted rhythms, butrather stopping on the first, second, third, and four notes of a group (A-D in the photo above).What is essential is absolutely rhythmic stability. If these rhythms are done sloppily they will

merely make you play more unevenly. A metronome is a good idea to keep the spacing betweenthe notes of military precision.

Also, instead of stopping on different notes in the group, play one group one tempo and thenext group exactly double or half the tempo (E-H in the photo). These 'groups' can be two, four,or eight notes or one bar, or even two bars. Again, this is useless if it's kind of a bit slower,then kind of a bit faster; we must keep the same pulse but vary the note values. This can be

really useful in a tricky, fast passage like the unison semiquavers of Tchaikovsky 1st concerto 3rdmovement before the Coda. Try practising one bar (or group) at tempo and then the next bar(or group) half the speed. You'll find that it really helps velocity and can aid memory too.

Artur Schnabel pointed out, we should not just look for the easiest fingering but for the mostmusical fingering one which matches the phrasing, which brings out the accents or inflections,or which allows a singing line to float along seamlessly.


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those when the left hand shapes and colours the harmony and counterpoint with infinitefinesse.

It's basically a frivolity to discuss whether this piece is more difficult than that piece, but it is

of crucial importance to analyze what makes something difficult in a passage so that wecan solve the problems. It is safe to say that few pieces (except certain etudes) are 'difficult'

they merely have difficult passages in them. And even these tricky passages are not trickyin themselves rather they contain tricky parts. One example of this is the famous Coda of the 2nd movement of the Schumann Fantasie op. 17, pictured above. The greatest pianistshave come unstuck here (most famously Horowitz at his famous 1968 Carnegie Hall recitalwhen more notes were wrong than right). If we arrive at this passage like a rabbit facing theheadlights of an oncoming car we will always risk disaster. (I love the words which Peter Vinograde, pianist and teacher at the Manhattan School, told me could be sung to its melodicoutline: "This is too hard, this is too hard, I should have gone to Juilliard".) In fact, to unpickthe difficulties is to begin to solve them: A is moderately hard for the right hand, easy for the

left; B is a tricky leap for both; C is a little easier, as both hands land on harder-to-miss blacknotes; D is simple for both hands. So about half of this passage is actually quite easy toplay. Sorting out the 'geography of the keyboard', as my teacher Derrick Wyndham used tosay, is an important way to making the path of performance safe and secure.

stephen hough's practice tips

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