Romantic era piano repertoire: A murmuring stream and the supple wrist (Burgmuller creates beauty from simplicity)

"The Clear Stream" from Friedrich Burgmuller's Twenty-Five Progressive Pieces offers a student an opportunity to create limpidly beautiful phrases from unraveled broken chords spun out in triplets. In order to create the "mormorando" (murmuring effect) in the treble, it's best to first block out the "chord" patterns with a "spongy" wrist in slow motion before…

For Intermediate Level students: A joyous way to improve piano technique while savoring the Romantic genre (Videos)

Piano students in the Intermediate range don't need to plod through method books to grow technique. In addition, they shouldn't be subjected to arrangements of the masterworks reduced to painful copies of the original. As example, "Fur Elise" often appears in dumb-down form, with a mid-section excision. What's left is the bare-bones beginning, usually transposed…