Confessions of an anxious ballet pianist day #7: The dreaded 2/4 sissonne
A short but apposite entry today, because I’m off to record a whole bunch of examples of exactly what this post is about: music for that kind of sissonne exercise…
Confessions of an anxious ballet pianist day #6: Playing the Black Swan variation music
The music that is harder to find than a black swan Let’s start with a few facts. Although this solo, and the Black Swan pas de deux that it comes…
Confessions of an anxious ballet pianist day #5: Playing for the White Swan variation
I’ve already written an entire recent post about one problem with accompanying this variation (The perils of musicality when you’re accompanying a ballet solo) but that’s not the end of…
The perils of “musicality” when you’re accompanying a ballet solo
When you’re accompanying a ballet solo, too much “musicality” (as musicians understand that term) can be a bad thing. In the last week, I’ve had the same correction from two…
That Czerny tarantella from Etudes – found but unidentified
Posters in an Italian piano forum have been playing the same game as me – trying to identify the Czerny studies used in Riisager’s ballet Etudes. In my post on…
More on “truly triple meter” – are Chopin’s waltzes really mazurkas?
I’m not saying that Chopin couldn’t write a waltz, or that his embodied sense of waltzing was too fragile to be able to incorporate it in music. But I wonder…