Week 2: How to Achieve Left Hand Balancing at the Piano with Dr. Eloise Kim!

Pat Van Buskirk Wonderful to have you, Pat! The Chopin Nocturne is a gorgeous piece indeed :) Thank you for joining this challenge, and feel free to share me any video links of your practice process!

Michelle R Hi Michelle! Yes, that is a fantastic selection to apply this practice to. Feel free to share me any video links of your practice process :)

Michelle R Fantastic work, Michelle! This sounds great! I love how you are experimenting with different techniques in the LH of finding that right sound world. It definitely takes a lot of what I call "trial and error," and finding the "right" muscle memory. And then applying what worked successfully. You are doing great in this video, and I like the sound world you are achieving--great work. This LH accompaniment requires a little more elevated wrist height as you mention because of the thumb (I know Piotr focused on the RH thumb last week :D), which is our heavy finger. An elevated wrist can help lighten that thumb weight naturally as well. Your hand position and approach to the keys look excellent to me. As a next step, try 'shadowing' the RH along with it, and let me know how it goes :)!

Michelle R Great work Michelle! I am impressed with your ability to maintain a nice control in the LH while ghosting the RH notes. This is definitely trickier to do than playing just the LH alone, but my personal philosophy behind this is, "if we can do it successfully in the harder way, than it will be easier when we play the passage in the 'normal' way: when both hands play together." Also the 'ghosting' technique helps us still 'activate' the RH muscle memory of the notes. Very good work!

I also want to mention (for everyone) that although this week's focus is on the "LH technique" of accompaniment style playing; When we play both hands together, we will have to keep in mind of the different amounts of weight and speed of attack that will be applied in each individual hand to achieve the appropriate balance.

I hope this exercise continues to be helpful for your Clementi! Please let me know if you have any questions I can further explain or elaborate on!

Michelle R That is fantastic that you have already been doing ghosting technique with your teacher! I look forward to hearing your next video of the hands together. Happy practicing! Thank you again for taking this challenge and sharing your hard work!

Ellen Weaver Hi Ellen! I am glad to hear you are finding this exercise a helpful challenge for you :) The Barber Nocturne is indeed a challenging LH with the wide leaps, and keeping that soft playing in that particular LH is tricky to do. I would advise practicing the LH alone slowly in small fragments at a time and with sensitive attention to your sound and balancing. You can 'experiment' with your technique and see what helps achieve the best sound world. Physically staying closer to the keys, and the application of that 'spider crawl' that I mention for the Chopin Nocturne in my video, can be similarly applied to the LH of the Barber. Happy practicing, and let me know if you have any further questions!

Helen Lee Wonderful work, Helen! Your step by step approach in this video is very well done and executed successfully! I agree that shadowing the RH simultaneously makes the control of the LH harder, but you did it beautifully well.  In this measures 9-16 of Variation XI, it has a similar accompaniment style to the Mozart d minor fantasy I demonstrate in my video of that 'pulsing' beats. Continue to stay physically very close to the keys and finding that right 'slower' speed of attack at the keyboard to approach a soft yet healthy and warmer tone. :) As you are already showing in your video, both hands are playing with a different action and weight to the piano to achieve that balance of a singing RH melody line and LH accompaniment. I encourage you to continue exploring other areas of the Mozart to apply this as well :) Great work-Thank you for your video!

Helen Lee Hi Helen! Thank you for taking this challenge to a different variation of the Mozart! This Variation II is definitely tricky particularly because of the speed the LH requires, as it is one of the faster variations of the set. I like your interpretation of emphasizing the first of the sixteenth note clusters. This adds in a more 'confident playfulness' character one often hears in many of Mozart's works. He in fact was a big opera composer, so the more variety of characters we can portray in our piano solo pieces, the better it is

I would encourage you to use a bit more relaxed wrist in this particular LH passage with also a more rounder hand position to portray an even more 'brilliant' sound technically. Especially when we have the leaps, the wrist should lead with a relaxed movement. The forearm of the left arm can also be facing slightly outward to give you more of an 'open' posture. I like to tell my students to feel the entire shoulder, arm, and hand as one bone together.

When you have the cross-overs in the LH using the 1-2-1-2-1-2-1 fingerings at the end of each measure, those are the notes we want to be particularly light with--so playing with an almost detached touch as you quicken up the speed can be helpful.

I thought at the end of the video when the RH joined in, the balance sounded great! I love this piece and so happy you are working on it. Keep up the great work!

Randi Hi Randi! This looks great, and wonderful work to you! Thank you for sharing your practice videos. This Debussy's Clair de Lune section you selected is definitely an area when we need to project our RH melody with a accompanying LH. The LH here spans quite a long distance at the keyboard even within these two measures, and your technical approach to the touch looks and sounds great! I would advise to also try practicing at a slower speed (LH alone) to experiment with different touches to continue maintaining more evenness and control of the keys. You could take this challenge further into m. 31-32 when the RH splits the sixteenth, and apply the same approach here as well. I am so happy you are learning the Clair de Lune, and I send my cheers! Thank you for taking this challenge.

Marc M Hi Marc! Thank you for taking this challenge, and sharing a great practice video! I like the process you are taking in detail steps at a time with the LH: achieving both the light sound world and tackling the challenging leaps. I also like how you are mapping out which is the more 'tricky' section within the excerpt you are working on, and targeting that technique. I am hearing improvements within this video already! This particular LH also needs to be played with a playful manner, and requires a lot of 'quick preparation' ahead of time to the next notes/intervals. Particularly focusing on leading with the thumb (for velocity) in the LH jumps can be helpful too when you take it faster up to speed. 

This piece is definitely very hard to do with the RH shadowing as it requires activating a new muscle memory, but I felt that at the end of the video, you achieved a great sound balance when both hands played together. I encourage you to try this challenge on other areas of the Poulenc, which you have a great start in already! Let me know if you have any questions that come along the way too

rebecca LAM Hi Rebecca! Welcome to the intensive, and what a wonderful coincidence that you are working on this Chopin Nocturne! It is a beautiful piece, and certainly quite a challenging one.

Your practice videos look great, and thank you for taking the correct steps. I like the sound world you are achieving with the LH, and you move with a nice relaxed arm which is required for this piece. The touch also sounds wonderful too.

It is indeed very tricky to shadow the RH in this piece because of the polyrhythms. The challenge also is to make sure the RH is 'hovering/shadowing' around the correct pitches of when they are supposed to be played. For the polyrhythms, I would suggest to first play strictly in time and marking in the score with a plan of exactly how you will like to line up the notes in the hands. For example at measure 2, this is an "11 against 6" because the RH has 11 notes with LH playing 6 eighth notes. In the end, Chopin meant for this to be 'free' sounding, and most performances of this nocturne slow the LH down naturally when the polyrhythms enter.

But for practicing purposes, it will be helpful to plan out a strict map first before adding freedom. For example in measure 2, since it is an 11 against 6: you could line up around two RH notes per single LH note and leave one of the set as a two against three. The next polyrhythm in measure 3 is a 22 against 12 (22 notes in the RH and 12 notes in the LH), which ends up being two 11 against 6's altogether. I am sending a picture of one way these two measures can be lined up in the hands and highlighted in orange where I would enter the 'two against three's', but I want to emphasize that this is not the only way to do it! I am only giving one of million suggestions :).

The balance between the hands sounded great to me at your third practice video. I encourage you to also practice slowly in the same above steps, because slow practice in this piece is very helpful in many passages. And yes, practicing the third step without pedal first will be a good extra step to hear more clearly of everything that is going on. Thank you for taking this challenge, and best wishes for your learning journey! let me know if any other questions come up along the way.