Mastering Tricky Passages and Answering Your Questions!
Due to the popularity and overflow of questions from last month's LIVE session, Dominic is back to help you! Do you have questions about your playing, fingering, challenging passages, or musical hurdles you’re trying to overcome? Whether it’s a simple query or a complex issue, every question matters, and every solution makes a difference! Join us live today for real-time advice and solutions from Dominic Cheli—your guide to mastering music, one finger at a time!
Leave any questions below in the chat!
Follow this event link to tune in!
https://app.tonebase.co/piano/live/player/pno-live-solutions-dominic-cheli-3
We are going to be using this thread to gather suggestions and questions!
- What questions do you have on this topic?
- Any particular area you would like me to focus on?
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Hi Dominic,
I'd be interested if you could discuss bars 9-11 in the vivace movement of Prokofiev 2nd Piano Sonata and any fingering tips for the two-hand arpeggio (especially left hand starting at far treble side of the keyboard) as well as tips for speed.
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Dear Dominic,
for measure 190 of J.S. Bach's Contrapunctus XIV (the unfinished fugue) i'm searching for a fingering to play it fluently and musically. The challenge is to get the second C in the bass and the tenor voice sound beautiful together. It is the fourth-to-last measure of the second fuge. I love that ending (and after that the B-A-C-H theme (german notation, in english: B-flat-A-C-B) is introduced for the third fuge
). Maybe it's just one of those ‘practice, practice, practice’ moments. Any ideas on how to twist my fingers cleverly to make it work? Regardless whether you get to this i hope to join live on April 8th—if i can't, I'll catch the recording! Best wishes Rainer-
as far as i got now i might suppose that keeping the hands exactly sorted (left hand bass and tenor voice, right hand alto and soprano) it's maybe really a practice thing to get a sensible touch for the second lower c? As the pinky has to arrive there pretty fast yet still play to sound with feel to beautifully integrate the note into its corresponding bass line. Coherent integrity of each of the four voices is key to let these pieces sound so amazing., There are many moments that make me imagine Bach mischievously grinning as he put these lines to paper with his quill.
Free Complete Art Of Fugue Score (with a suggested fingering that i find hard as well)
https://tinyurl.com/4vcwcpmu page 121
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Hi Dominic, I'm struggling with how to finger a chord voicing frequently used by Rachmaninoff. It's where you have an octave played on the natural 7th of the chord, simultaneously with the 1 and the 5. For example, for a D chord: C#,D,A,C#.
Rach uses it for example in his A Major Prelude, in measures 15, 16, 17, 19 and 21. (see attached circled in Red), and in other of his Preludes, including the climactic M. 66 of the D Major, and even in the bass such as in M. 35 of the B minor .
I feel like the dissonance of the 7th and the 1 is a very important feature of the sound and that therefore the 1 should not be left out of the voicing. For me it requires a real stretch of the 2nd and 5th fingers to play the interior root (2 on the RH) and the upper 7th (5 on the RH). The 5th of the chord is less of a problem, as it falls rather naturally on the 4th finger when the other fingers are stretched like that. I can reach the voicing but in the quicker passages where it appears multiple times with accents, it can hurt.
As an alternative, I've tried sliding off the bottom note when it is a black key onto the adjacent white key with my thumb, which dilutes the effect somewhat. Someone else recommended bending your thumb knuckle to hit both the C# and D at the same time.
Can you share how you approach these voicings? Thanks a lot.
