Week 1: Choose your piece!
Welcome to the latest Community Challenge!
For this challenge "A Fresh Start" the goal is to pick a BRAND-NEW piece to work on this month.
This is the time to finally open that score that you have been thinking about and get to work!
What are we doing in week 1?
- Select your New piece to work on, and share it below! Let's see what everyone is choosing!
- Submit one video of your practice this week, perhaps featuring your favorite passage of the opening bars!
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In 1986 – I was 17 years old and had been taking lessons with my first professional piano teacher for less than 2 years but was already as crazed a piano nerd as they come – Vladimir Horowitz visited my hometown of Hamburg to give his first recital in Germany in decades. After 60 years, he returned to the city of his first breakthrough triumph outside of Russia when on January 20, 1926, he had filled in on short notice, for a soloist fallen ill that day, in Tchaikovsky’s B flat minor concerto, with Eugen Pabst conducting.
My father and I waited in line all night, from the late afternoon to 11 am, to buy one ticket each (the maximum allowed per person). On the day of the concert, my mother – to whom my father had graciously yielded his ticket – and I were in our seats, nearly bursting with anticipation, when the old, frail man entered the stage of the Laeiszhalle, sat down, gently placed his white handkerchief beside the keyboard, and began to play. After the first couple of bars, we looked at each other with what must have been the same rapturous smile; neither of us had ever heard such a rich, grand, singing, breathing, blossoming and utterly beautiful sound as was emanating from the piano now, seeming to fill every niche of the concert hall.
That piece with which Horowitz opened his recital, which immediately brought tears to our eyes and forever embedded its magic in my memory, was Scarlatti’s Sonata in B minor K. 87 / L. 33. I have always wanted to learn it, and now I will.