Dearly Beloved ~ Concert Paraphrase #3
Had a lot going on so didn’t get to post this any sooner, but this take is from two weeks ago… and I haven’t played since, so unfortunately I can’t really recall too many of the finer details. But I’ll see what I can do… I do vaguely remember that my max tempo was around 72 bpm but I likely played slower in the take and my metronome is all the way downstairs :~)
Detailed Breakdown
To preface, this was a terrible recording session but I really wanted to at least get one take that I could put up. Even that was a big challenge… it was one of those days lol.
I do think the opening arpeggios sound smoother than before! I’m surprised watching myself two weeks later. And then my soul left my body from 0:13 because I start to play the D in the upper register that rings- it affected my playing because I was mentally like “I don’t want to hit that key because it rings” but my body was like “b??? we gotta???” so. Yeah. Slight hiccup at 0:24 as I blanked out for a moment on the way down with the LH, but otherwise not too bad for this section. Still some empty space when I jump down from 0:36, but I’m happy with the note accuracy on my landings.
I might just permanently add a small space at 0:41 as my LH jumps down to the octave as ~artistic liberty~ because I’ve tried to practice that jump and it’s just… very difficult to get reliably. Maybe I just need to practice more… The rest of this dissonant section is coming along with practice. LH C octave is still not perfectly clean, so will keep working on it. And I think the RH voicing improved a bit in the second half, with allowing the higher register C’s to come through while the middle register chords blend in with the LH more. Hopefully.
The melodic section from 1:06 is still just… there LOL I like how last time I was all “yeah nothing has changed since the previous post” and that’s still true now. Whoops. My playing is super messy here because I just wanted to get a take and I was mentally pretty done.
Section with chords from 2:16 has some random pauses and slowing down because I continued to be mentally done with this whole recording business for the day; still need to work on those final few bars.
The LH arpeggios from 2:45 were probably my biggest improvement for this take compared to the previous post; I put in a lot of reps for this section, and I’m glad it kind of shows. You know, aside from the fact that I had to START OVER like two bars in, and then ended up literally stopping at the top of the C arpeggio. And missed notes everywhere. It’s fine. Rewatching this is hilarious because even weeks later, I can just Tell how frustrated I am from watching my playing lol. SO one thing I had to relearn here was the arpeggio at 3:09; I watched another person play this arrangement on YT and I realized that those arpeggios at 3:06 and 3:09 are INDEED MEANT TO BE SPLIT BETWEEN HANDS like I ORIGINALLY THOUGHT!!!! HOWEVER!!! The one at 3:06 works better as a LH arpeggio for me anyway since my RH can’t reliably open up to an octave after playing the end of the arpeggio, and the jump down isn’t that bad. But, it is a win for the arpeggio at 3:09 since I was highkey struggling with the gymnastics around this one; being able to play the last few notes in the RH is a gamechanger since that frees up my LH to jump down basically 70% of the keyboard. I swear I practiced the thirds at 3:16 and they sound better than that most of the time, I just really hated my entire life in the moment.
(Not me straight up forgetting where my HALF NOTE CHORDS GO AT 3:31!!) Nothing new of note for the final section- haven’t practiced any of that in detail and I was just excited to be done with a take. No, I haven’t practiced my E major arpeggios, but they’re on my list.
Wow, I remembered a lot more than I expected to- nice.
Current Thoughts
I guess I’ll do current thoughts including two weeks after the fact lol. The main reason I haven’t been playing, aside from general major life events, is indeed because of the wack D that rings like crazy- the piano is supposed to be tuned soon (ahead of its usual annual tuning in August) so hopefully that fixes things. It’s a small thing that doesn’t actually impact anything physically about playing, but I just can’t stand hearing the ringing, especially since there’s a lot of pedaling happening, with a lot of that D being played.
I’ve probably lost a lot of the momentum that I had from a few weeks ago, which sucks but also it happens, I guess. It’ll be back to practicing patiently with the met and all that fun stuff.
Honestly, there wasn’t all that much to show, anyway- I’d mostly just spent the week doing reps with the met to improve the arpeggios and such. There’s still so much to do in terms of speeding up and getting to performance tempo, but at the time of recording, I felt pretty good about the cohesion.
I went from 4:30 last time to about 4:10 this time, and if we remove like 20 seconds of me fumbling around, then we can shave down to 3:50… and that’s still without the whole intro section. But that’s not too bad compared to the official recording’s 4:07 or whatever. I definitely saved a lot of time by speeding up the section with the huge LH arpeggios, but there is still much work to be done.
I’m in one of my piano slumps right now. I guess part of it is just from real life kicking my butt (but like, in a good way- just busy) but this is also something that just happens from time to time so I hope I can get back into it once the piano is tuned and no longer drives me crazy lol.