Chopin Fantaisie Impromptu Vlog

hi my name is Elvire Boelee from the  DimitrovBoelee piano duo and today I'm going to vlog a little bit of my practice and  I'm practicing the fantasy impromptu by Chopin. So I started practicing it a couple of  days ago, I put a few hours into it already and I've identified generally two things that I  want to work on. And and I'm not going to really work on anything else until I get those two things  straight and that is the um the the four against three groups uh meaning that you have 16th no

tes  in the right hand and triplets in the left hand and the speed so this is what i am mainly  working on now as a priority which means that even like phrasing and and all those things i  noticed them but they're a little bit on the background for me today until i get those things  in order so i think actually building speed is something that students are very interested in so  i think maybe it will be useful a little bit if i talk talk a little bit about that and show you how  i do that i thin

k one of the things that students really underestimate is how well you have to  know a piece by heart before you can play it actually really really fast so that is one of the  things i'm working on right now to know it so well by heart that you can wake me up in the middle  of the night hang me upside down and i'll still know it by heart like that well you know that's  how you need to know it by heart before you can actually play the speed that you want to speak  want to play so i'm going to sho

w you a little bit of my process of how i uh try to learn it  by heart and and at the same time how i try to um get to know technically the piece also that my  fingers know the piece i'll show you so i think the thing the main thing that's important here is  to that i practice the entire piece without pedal um all the time so i only very very rarely add  pedal and that is so that i can hear really very clearly if i'm playing 16th notes in the right  hand and triplets in the left hand and also fo

r myself i've chosen a section of three pages  because i i technically feel that it is one breath but however for you today for the vlog i'm gonna  show you a shorter section just not to take up too much time so i'm gonna start just with a slow uh  par slow practice of this section without pedal do so small mistake so i fixed that i'm going to stop here and after that i'm gonna  do it separate hands so i think this is another thing that students underestimate  is once you can play hands together

it's very tempting to keep on  playing hands together but if you keep on playing hands together with with this  piece and with any other piece you really overlook things there are things that you don't  hear because you are concentrating on two hands so i always in my pieces practice hands separate  and i'm going to practice hand separate now and it's also a great opportunity to learn it  by heart by learning the hands separately by heart i'm already trying to play as much as  possible as i can

by heart even though i do need to look at the page every every now and  then now i'm going to do the left hand and i think in the piece this piece for me left  hand is the main problem and i think you see this with a lot of romantic pieces that  the left hand is playing out very stretched stretched you see how my fingers are very  stretched of course i have small hands but these are large distances and if you  have large distances in your left hand that need to be played fast and that are  main

ly on the black keys which of course are much more narrow than the white keys  is actually really tricky so whenever you see such a such a kind of structure of a  piece you have to realize that you have to practice your left hand probably more  than you practice your your right hand you also notice that this is pretty  uncomfortable actually to play it's not my favorite thing to  play because it is uncomfortable and right now in this bar where we're  having this big jump you know from here this

part of the keyboard to this part of the  keyboard i'm making a mental note of that that is going to be an issue in the future when  i'm trying to play both hands in a fast tempo okay so this is um what i'm  going to do i'm going to actually in my practice i'll not show you now but i'm  going to play again the left and the right hand separately in a faster tempo and let  me just show you the left hand real quick because i already determined that that is  the more uncomfortable of the two so i'm

gonna play that in a faster tempo and  see what's what's what comes up there so exactly as i already predicted this  uh large jump was actually an issue i didn't land very well that can very  easily end up in a mistake especially playing it in concert um and i don't know if  you heard but i was having a bit of trouble playing it even and what that has to do  with that it is rather uncomfortable so your left hand in this case really does need  extra practice and i will do that off camera now i'm

going to try in a faster tempo still  without petal i'm going to try hands together did a fingering mistake there  so i'm going to repeat that i think i did it again let me try and just one of the other things about playing by  heart you have to not only remember the notes but you also have to remember the correct fingering so  i'm gonna try that once more in a bit faster tempo and although it might seem that i was successful  with uh increasing speed actually the left and the right hand are not

so good together i'm not  playing i'm playing unevenly the triplets in the left hand the right hand is not together with  the with the left hand and that is something that in a very fast tempo is difficult to follow  and that's why you have to keep on switching uh switching your tempo as i'm doing now  now just for pleasure just for fun i'll put once the pedal and you'll see that it all  sounds very much more impressive without me actually doing anything different which of  course gives a littl

e bit of satisfaction so even though that sounded more impressive i  actually did miss a few notes uh but that's the danger if you actually practice with pedal  you you think that you're doing better than you actually are and i um do this what i'm showing  you right now just in a kind of shortened version i do this for the entire section that i chose  for myself and every round that i do takes me a little more than 20 minutes and i do that  three times which means that it takes me a bit more tha

n an hour to complete this kind of  work that i'm doing on this first section i think that's another thing that maybe people tend  to underestimate how long it takes for a piece this is not really a difficult piece if i'm honest  what makes it difficult is the speed and the the rhythm so your right hand playing 16th notes in  your left hand playing triplets but technically it's not really very difficult so just for a  piece it's not that difficult to get it up to a really fast speed because it's

a legalizator  and later on it's presto it takes actually a lot of effort it takes a long time it just takes you  know the work the repetition especially to get it by heart so well that you simply cannot forget  it and to get the tempo up to speed without running the risk that your left hand kind of  follows your right hand like something random so still increasing the tempo and still  keeping this proper rhythm of the triplets against the 16th notes so that's a little  part of my practice that

's a little bit of a peek into how do we actually increase speeds  which is something i think all students are interested in and i think that what you can take  away from this for now is to learn it by heart really really really well just unbelievably well  that you cannot forget it that you cannot forget it even in such a fast tempo and to repeat  it a lot to not put any pedal to make sure that you're listening to every single note that  everything is clear and everything is not sloppy that eve

rything is precise so i think a lot  of repetition learning it by heart those are the first steps and after when you feel very  stable you can you know you can go into more musical things as well like the balance and  the phrasing and all these kinds of things so that's what i'm doing now  this week and i hope you enjoyed thank you so much for watching don't forget to  subscribe if you haven't subscribed yet and don't forget to like the video that helps us out a lot  you can check out our instag

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