How to bring an old piano piece back to playing condition (Example Chopin Nocturne in E minor, Op. 72, No. 1) Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IVXQNPRfyA

Many piano students who have slaved over a composition for a number months, reach a certain level of competency, and then curiously, tuck the piece away like they would store winter clothes in moth balls.

Not a good idea. First, there are better ways to preserve woolens, if not Nocturnes, Waltzes, Sonatas, you name it.

My adult pupils, in particular, who’ve shed blood, sweat and tears over a Chopin Waltz, for instance, will be relieved after a few months to replace it with something brand new. But what will happen with the “old” Waltz a year later, if not more?

Will it be so totally forgotten that a revisit will require a mammoth re-learning from the ground up?–an unpopular undertaking.

For this reason, if only to keep students within reach of their repertoire before it becomes ancient history, I encourage composition reviews as an ongoing process.

For those at late Intermediate to Advanced levels this would mean keeping previously learned pieces on the back burner at least, with easy shifts to the front.

The question is how to do this when time is sparing?

Perhaps it might be a good idea to list all the pieces learned in the past year or two, and revisit each at weekly or bi-monthly intervals. Such scheduling gives ample time to go over the good fingering that should have been established in the formative learning stages, as well as to review the theoretical, structural, and harmonic underpinnings of the piece.

If the initial study process was thoroughly LAYERED, the retrieval of pieces will come easier and more naturally than if the original learning experience was superficial.

By superficial I mean that the student basically sight-read the music with slapdash fingering and did not separate the hands at any point. More than likely, the exposure to the piece was short-lived and the pupil moved on too quickly to the next flavor of the week composition. (on demand)

I like to think that my students are not too removed from the learning process I’ve adopted, so they can more easily pull compositions back into their fingers without a big sweat.

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Come to think of it I recently excavated a Chopin Nocturne from the depths of my piano bench that was buried under a pile of more recently learned music. And my fear was the same as harbored by my students when they were asked them to bring an old Beethoven sonata, first movement to the next lesson. “What?????????”

The difference, in my case, was that I really wanted to reclaim a particular Romantic era composition to see if I had grown musically, or had a new interpretive spin on it.

I trusted that my initial learning adventure was steeped in enough detail that my review would not be laborious.
And while I should have followed my own advice revisiting the Nocturne periodically, I had just amassed too much repertoire to keep up with the old stuff.

The way I resuscitated the Chopin Nocturne in E minor, Op. 72, no. 1, was in steps:

1) I blocked out the Left Hand broken arpeggios where I could. (in slow tempo)
2) I then played through the Left Hand in back tempo, with good phrasing, applying a deep in the keys approach.
3) I made sure to mark out harmonies in the score. (These had been penciled in already, but I had some additions to make)
4) I played the right hand with an over-projected tone, to deep feel my way again into the piece, making fingering adjustments as I thought necessary.

The fingering assessment surprised me. In measure 37 that I have reproduced below, the editor had an impossible choice. No matter how conscientiously I explored his recommendation, with rhythms, played at various tempi, the passage was a total finger jammer.
Finally, after sorting different possibilities, I came up with an adjustment that allowed me to brave the third page without a hitch.

5) When I finally played hands together through the whole piece, it was behind tempo, with an ear toward balance between the hands, nuance and dynamics.

With these rudimentary steps in place, as an added layer to what I had applied in my first learning exposure, the Nocturne sprang more easily back to life:

(played on the Haddorff piano)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IVXQNPRfyA