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Our members in action with a Haydn Concerto
Breaking News!
How are you all keeping up with this massive lockdown? Are you working from home, doing online lessons, or on the contrary you are keeping yourself busy studying piano?
During these difficult times, it is good to take advantage and keep ourselves doing what we never have time to do: practicing properly.
We spend our days working, busy with projects, students and commitments, and we struggle to find a proper portion of time to dedicate ourselves to what we love. We end up just moving our fingers and rehearsing pieces we already know, or barely studying new pieces. However, we do not have time enough on the day to properly go through new pieces, and rehearse new scores. Also, we find hard to get time enough to meet other musicians to talk about music, or simple rehearse or prepare music programmes for concerts together.
Little by little, we find ourselves far from being proper musicians. Life nowadays became harder, more competitors, more expenses. That took us to work on a more extended interval of time per day, which means less time for us and our passion: music and piano.
These times, even being bad for the society, health, jobs, and overall the future this is going to leave us, we need to be stronger than ever, reformulate our ways of working, and also see the good things this could bring us all. In this case, as musicians, we need to find this as an opportunity for us to develop our skills, and prepare that concert we always wanted to prepare and could never do so.
Who knows, maybe once all this situation gets sorted, and we can get back to normal, you can apply for any school or orchestra and play that concert.
Juan Rezzuto and our members know it well, and they put their hands to work. They are now preparing the famous Haydn piano concerto in F. A jewel of classical music. Juan Rezzuto as soloist, accompanied by some of our members playing their second instrument, either violin, cello and bass.
The concert is expected to happen on the 3rd of October 2020 in London, more details here. However, given the circunstancies, we never know. Hopefully, all this will be sorted by then, and we can all celebrate music and passion in this concert, and with you all.
Keep well, and especially, keep on practicing on the piano!
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How to get the perfect balance between teaching and performing piano
The professional piano teacher: The balance between performance and education
As artists, we began our life like everybody else, with piano tuition, learning from piano teachers. We are only involved in the role of piano students. The hope is to become a concert pianist one day and offer the world our performances, sharing the music that we cherish and love. But life gets in the way, and usually, this path takes us to another direction. This path can direct us to the life of a piano tutor. It usually starts to afford our piano lessons, sometimes for other reasons.The consequence of this is to have less time at the piano: the instrument that we devoted so much time and effort get farther and farther away. The practice becomes less and less, and we find ourselves teaching more than practicing.
Still, something surprising arises from our teaching: the hope to find a new genius, someone we could pass on our knowledge and our experience after so many years of study, but after a while, we discover that this might never come. Although we have outstanding musicians, this “genius” we once envisioned never turns into a reality.
What to do?
As Maestro Rezzuto, founder of Pianist AID, states in his article “We have reached the most critical inflexion point in our musical careers. We can now decide not to take action; we can just let ourselves drift into professional frustration.Or maybe…, we can try and now and redefine the way we organice our musical and professional lives.”This situation will propel us to another state in our careers: The joy of coming back to perform live is also accompanied by a certain level of frustration, we know we don’t have the same level we used to have before.
How to deal with this new phase of our lives?
When we were young musicians, we spent an average of six hours in the piano every day. Now those days are gone. We gained experience; we are more efficient!
Now, we can size our challenges to our possibilities better. Also we will need to define our musical projects very well, so they can be genuinely transcendental for our development. And organising our diaries, chose our projects carefully and methodically, and we will see more and more satisfaction from our performances, and this will reflect in our teaching process.Do not miss this great article, and piece of advice, posted on WKMT Music Blog. […]
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The Scaramuzza technique: a fresher perspective
WKMT Tutor’s experience in learning the Scaramuzza technique
One of the most difficult challenges…
For every musician is to change their technique once they have acquired certain mastery on the instrument. The challenges are many and they appear from many aspects of the playing, but the most demanding at the beginning is the one that has to do with the muscle memory. This can be our best friend or worst enemy, as all the movements get so ingrained in the hands of the performer that requires a high level of commitment to change it, but with patience and dedication, the results are always positive.
The experience presented by Georgios Kommatas…
A new piano teacher at WKMT has two angles: one is to adapt himself to the new system developed at the studio, and the second one, and more relevant, is to become a piano student of the Scaramuzza technique given at the studio.
This approach to the technique has four steps…
The first one entails the complete relaxation of the student “The fingers must carry the weight of the whole arm’ is the instruction, ‘nothing else must be tense’”The second step of the Scaramuzza Technique is a correct Hand Position on the piano. The advantages of a proper Hand Position can be observed straightaway. The fingers can play with precision all the dynamics and articulations demanded.
The third step is related to musical notation: When we read a music score, the notes show us two dimensions:
pitch and duration.
Scaramuzza has added a third dimension in the score: Hand Movements. Finger, Forearm, Hand, Rotation and Wrist Movements are the five options, which correspond to the other two dimensions.
The last step has more to do with the acceptance of having to delay pieces that might have more pianistic level but are not the correct ones to use for approaching this technique from scratch and to trust your piano tutor and his guidance.
How can this help me?…
Have you ever heard about the benefits of learning a piano technique? There is a huge list of benefits for all those students learning the piano using a technique from scratch. Georgios intends to analyse the hardest parts, as well as some of the benefits. Browsing the Scaramuzza’s Movements Blog, you could get to know all the different movements you could use, and how this technique could help you improve your performing skills, as well as relaxing your body in the process. Yes, you have read well, relaxation is […] -
Classical concert at WKMT 2020
Classical concert at WKMT 2020Haydn & Mozart concert in LondonHello pianists, musicians and readers, we come back with breaking news!This concert has been suspended by the organisation. Following the procedures to contain the COVID-19 in Italy, Spain and France, they decided to cooperate in the same way and postpone this concert.We will keep you all updated about the next date for this beautiful concert in London.Looking forward to it!—-We welcome the new year with a new classical concert in March. We are now organising with WKMT Studios all the programmes for the concerts for this year in London. Below you will find the details for what it will be the first concert of 2020.For this special occasion, we will offer the Piano Concerto in F-major, H.XVIII:7 composed by the renowned Joseph Haydn, inventor of the Sonata Form and the Violin Concerto No. 1 in B-flat major, K. 207 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The solo Violin will be in charge of the lead violinist, Paola Delucchi, who will perform along Maestro Juan Rezzuto at the piano.These concerts are part of a long-term project by the hand of the concert pianist and Director of WKMT, Juan Rezzuto, whose ambition is to perform all Haydn Keyboard Concertos. In this opportunity, he will perform together with the WKMT String Ensemble one of the least known ones, as it is one of the “obscure” ones. The main reason is that is the only one that the second movement was not autographed by Haydn (although we do know that he composed it) of the work extant, and the concerto first appeared in London as published by Gardom in 1772. Another curious fact about this Concerto is that it does not include a Viola part, making this setting quite unusual. Both concerts are a tremendous opportunity for all our piano students to have a deeper perspective of how the Scaramuzza technique works in concert pieces and to complement the instruction received by our piano tutors at WKMT studio, who impart this technique upon the guidance of the Director who learned it from one of the pupils of Scaramuzza himself, Bruno Gelber.Without a doubt, this Concert will be a gorgeous one to begin the year in the enchanting company of the two unparalleled composers of the Classical period. Hope you enjoy and we are looking forward to seeing you all on March the 28th 2020 in St. Cuthbert’s Church, Earl’s Court from […]
