A couple of other points from Thursday night's class:
1) Some people learned to play the piano completely differently from the way I did. This lady in my class does not read music very well; rather, she plays what she hears from memory. I was quite amazed as to how she is learning Beethoven's Appassionata not so much from the score but from her listening. I wish I have a better ear.
2) Nerves. I haven't had to perform a new piece from memory in a while now. Last night's playing of Paganini-Liszt #4 was my first in, oh, 9 years at least. I had numerous slip-ups, and missed an entire bar in a section I thought I knew both mechanically and harmonically. I guess I was nervous, ended up playing faster than I should, and by the time I reached that section my arms were already all tense and I was just fighting to keep things under control.
I also noticed that I had to take breaks when I was playing that 2-minute piece. By breaks, I don't mean literally stopping; I mean slight ritardandos at places where they aren't musically called for. There are a bunch of left-hand cross-overs in the piece, such as:
The leap back is more than 2 octaves. I had to slow down a little bit to ensure that I hit the right notes both reaching there and coming back, not to mention trying to make them not sound harsh. If I weren't so tense, I could pull off without those ritards, but at the time I had to because because my arms were so stiff and needed that split-second break to recover.
It's debatable whether it's musical to take a breath, but that's beside the point. In the end, I probably should take a tiny breath anyway, because otherwise the passage sounds like it's coming from a machine.
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