Pianist, Seymour Bernstein is the subject of an Ethan Hawke produced documentary

It's about time a pianist, teacher, composer and author made it to the big screen. Seymour Bernstein is the star of a 81-minute documentary that's drawing critical acclaim in early Festival showings. On the East Coast, Seymour: An Introduction is slated for two important fall screenings at the prestigious New York Film Festival at Lincoln…

Performance Anxiety and Pressure Relievers

The symposia at Carnegie Hall's Weill Music Institute brought three top flight performers together to share thoughts about performance-related issues. Leon Fleisher, Yo Yo Ma, and Pamela Frank, all fine musicians in their own instrumental cosmos, agreed that the Ego can be an impediment to anxiety-free music-making. Zeroing in on "performance pressure," Maestra Frank, a…

What happened during the Earthquake!

From Berkeley, California At 3:19 a.m. I had just revisited my recently posted video of Bach's Sarabande (French Suite in G)--a foreboding? http://youtu.be/hL3XnZosZ-E ... when suddenly the wall I was leaning against, ( while seated at the piano), started swaying from side-to-side. (somewhat like swells to crescendo < with releases >) Next, I felt a…

The shrinking world of music

To put it lightly, degrees of separation in our musical cosmos are melting rapidly. By example, a Facebook post to my profile page from my 1960s era Orchestra teacher, led to a long lost neighbor who was the youngest member of the New York Philharmonic. To backtrack a bit, Herbert Gardner, a time-honored music director…

Spot Practicing at the Piano: It’s Quality, not Quantity

Some call it "spot cleaning," I prefer spot "refining" to describe THOUGHTFUL, isolated step-wise measure practicing. Needless to say, a troublesome measure is surrounded by others that lead in and exit out of the problematic center, so it's not enough to have only a focal spotlight on a particular glitch, though it's a good start.…

Piano Technique: Applying Various strategies to unravel a scale in 10ths (VIDEO)

Most of my adult students get unnerved when starting a scale three notes into it. And to make matters worse, they become panic-stricken when one hand is not a carbon copy of the other. (i.e. both hands are not playing the same notes at the same time) In the case of E minor, using the…

“Hear it before you play it!”

Leon Fleisher, an icon in the universe of pianists, put it succinctly. He channeled the wisdom of Artur Schnabel that embodied the idea that a musician must have an internal sense of what he expects to hear before playing a single note. http://youtu.be/mAsA9EZc08c Fleisher further insisted that playing by accident, or having a pile of…

Teaching a Chopin Nocturne under the influence of Arthur Rubinstein

I must admit that one of my daily activities is sampling You Tube videos of celebrated pianists, and as I teach a new composition to a student, I draw an attentive ear to pre-recorded ornament executions, phrasing, and tempo. It's not that I want to copy another performer's interpretation or impose a specific reading on…

Prjevalskaya soars as a world-wide pianist!

Marianna Prjevalskaya, an international personality, with roots in Spain; mentored in her formative years by her Russian mother, is a conspicuously accomplished pianist. As she journeys from one competition to another, she's racking up prizes in every venue imaginable. But what's most noteworthy are her profound gifts of communication: The pianist's phrase-loving playing has drawn…

From Chemo to Carnegie Hall, a Local Pianist makes her New York Debut

This is a heart-wrenching story that reads like a movie script. A gifted musician in the throes of her teaching career is stricken with cancer, endures bouts of energy-draining chemotherapy, but clings to the piano as her lifeline. In the final scene, she's not on her death bed, but on the stage of Carnegie to…