Previously: The best Chopin I’ve ever played.

Let’s get into it, shall we?

If you listen to and/or watch the video, you might notice—

um—

well, I can’t tell you what you might notice, I’m not you, but I can tell you what I noticed:

• This performance is so very much stronger than the last time I did a full recording. Deliberate practice does in fact yield results!

• The first two movements would definitely pass any undergraduate-level jury assessment, and would probably be good enough for an undergraduate-level senior recital.

• I give the first two movements a C.

Why? Two reasons.

• I’m close to 95-98 percent “accurate,” if you count “accuracy” as “correct notes vs. incorrect ones.” But I’m only doing 70 percent of what I hope to do with the piece, in terms of specificity, control, focus, interpretation, and so on. (Also, one of the things I hope to achieve with the piece is 100 percent note accuracy.)

• If you survey me not against “all of the people in my age group who can play the piano at any level” but against “all amateur pianists in any age group who are committed to serious piano study,” I might be in the 70th percentile. I’m not even the best pianist in my own house (that’d be the gentleman currently practicing the Emperor Concerto in the next room).

I went ahead and recorded the third movement separately (you’ll know why, if you watched the video), and that recording—which wouldn’t pass any juries, ever—is only worth a D.

Yes, I am familiar with the whole Ben Zander “give yourself an A” theory, The Art of Possibility is one of my very favorite books, and I suppose if I were one of Zander’s music students and I was going to write myself the “how I earned my A” letter, it would go something like this:

Dear Nicole—

You earned your A this year by practicing slowly. You deliberately identified a problem to address with each repetition. You committed to mindful repetition until each successive problem was solved and any inconsistencies were eliminated. You didn’t give in to the temptation to play the entire thing through, at tempo, under the fantasy that everything might come out perfectly this time and you wouldn’t have to do any actual work.

That’s a little unfair—you’re very good at working. But you also fall into this trap of wanting to show your work, which means taking progress videos, and you could be using that time to solve problems.

Or you could at least take practice videos instead of progress videos, where you talk through a problem as you solve it.

Anyway. You know exactly what you need to do to earn an A, and you can start working in that direction the next time you sit down at the piano, which might be as soon as four hours from now.

Love,

N

That—as I suspected it might—turned out to be just as useful as Zander suggested it would be.

Back to work. ❤️