The Dilemma of Balance

The competition was very educational.  I got my clock cleaned; it was good for me.  I saw kids years younger than me playing at a level of pianism I hadn’t even thought about striving for.  It’s easy to dismiss the kids as geniuses and move on when you aren’t there competing with them.  At this point, I need to make some changes in my strategy and decide once for all what I intend to do for the rest of my career.

The issue that gives me the most pause as an aspiring pianist is how much music to learn.  It seems like the last thing that should be on my mind; but every time a major series of performances is over, such as the end of every summer, I feel a little overwhelmed at having to decide what I should learn in the coming fall.   At the moment there are several options before me.

        1.  Learn a lot of music this semester. The repertoire I have posted on the repertoire page as the “rep in progress” section is as follows: Beethoven Sonata Op. 101, Berio Erdeklavier, Chopin Etude Op. 10 no. 1 and Ballade no. 2, Prokofiev Piano Concerto no. 2, Ravel Gaspard de la Nuit, and Schumann Waldszenen. It’s a recital program plus a concerto.

        2.  Continue with the Chopin Ballade and pick up something older like the Waldstein Sonata and some other pieces I have already learned and try to perfect them.

        3.  Continue with the Chopin Ballade and pick two other pieces to learn from the list of repertoire in progress that I have posted.

The kids I competed against had been playing their pieces for years. I who only picked up that Chopin Ballade last semester didn’t stand a chance.  I have never had the kind of teachers who expect their students to practice the same three pieces for years, never allowing them to be satisfied and move on, and I have never been one to persevere on the same piece for years on end when I don’t have to.

This chart I have created to demonstrate the way I see things.  What we have is a triangle, to show that as your quality of playing increases, the size of repertoire decreases. Likewise, the one who plays a lot of music cannot increase the quality of his playing without hitting the border of the triangle, at which point if he would play better he must limit the amount of music he plays.  One look at my repertoire page will show that I have already acquired a very large repertoire and learn lots of music every semester, playing it at some level approximately where I put my dot.  The gold medalist at the competition in Colorado plays extremely well, but on talking with him I learned that he has a repertoire of only 50 minutes of music.  I assume his strategy is to increase his level of playing and then level out and learn new repertoire.  The other extreme from pianists like me is Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, who only played a few hours of music his entire life, but played it all extremely well.  He is certainly one of the finest pianists ever to live because of his obsessive perfectionism. It also appears that for whatever reason, there are these superhuman pianists like Claudio Arrau who played on a level that I can only dream of attaining, but with a massive repertoire.  That is the section enclosed by the dashed line outside of the triangle.

Of course my diagram is not at all definitive, but it gives an idea of how I see the situation panning out.  I think I will proceed vertically and slightly to the left from now on. What I mean by this is not that I will never learn new pieces, but that I will focus entirely on increasing the quality of my playing and willingly slow down the pace at which I learn music to accomplish that.  I am getting older, but I hope that the technique that I still lack to play everything with ease is still acquirable to an extent.