Identifying the phrase

Lesson again on Wednesday and this time I played much better. I am not sure whether it is because I am back into the routine of lessons again, because I ended up being nearly late so I went straight in instead of sitting in the car for 5 minutes or whether just acknowledging it and trying to understand it has made it go away.  For now at least.  Either way I felt relaxed enough to be able to play as I normally play in my practice room. So I felt like it was a good lesson.

The Luft study had improved a lot.  An extra week of practice to make the notes more fluent while being able to focus more specifically on breathing and stamina really helped me put the whole thing together.  I need to remember that strategy of practising getting through a whole section - from breath to breath - and then putting 2/3/ sections togetehr at a time.  I'm moving onto the next one this week, so the challenge is to identify breathing points early in the process and stick to them

I am charging through the French Suite - the Passepied came together pretty well last week, the notes aren't so difficult.  There are couple of points of rhythm and phrasing to check, moving on to the fourth piece this week.  I had a play through last night, it is the shortest piece in the work and doesn't appear too complicated.   But don't really "get" it yet.  It feels like a random collection of notes at the moment, I need to make it feel like music, with phrases and direction.

We spent some time in the lesson on Telemann Fantastia No 6.  This is another "phrasing" challenge....it feels like a theme is emerging, which I don't think is co-incidental.  My teacher has set me a challenge to understand exactly where each note is in its phrase and which direction it is moving in.  It is new to me to think about this level of detail of interpretation, and I find it difficult and that it is good.  It has made me think about the piece in a different way.  I'll be working on this over the weekend.

There was no time to look at the Reizenstein in the lesson so I will keep on with it for another week.  Last week I focussed mainly on getting the finger twisting bits more fluent, and there is still plenty more to do on that.  However last night I went straight to the middle section which has long slow, legato, fluent phrases - almost quite myseterious.  I know I need to fix the rhythm,  it does changes from 6/8 to duplets to crotchets and in parts I am aware that I am just approximating what is written. Last night I didn't get beyond the first phrase though - tone, tuning, smoothness issues were leaping out at me too much.  So I focussed on trying to make it beautiful and tryig to maintain the quality of sound through the note changes.  Too often there is a dip, or even a break, the note goes flat at the end and the phrase ends rather abruptly.  I found it quite helpful to treat it as a technical exercise and focus on improving one thing at a time. It reminded me that these are things I should be thinking about when I do my scales at the beginning of my practice.  I think there was some improvement by the end...but still a long way to go.