Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner How good are the best sight readers?

I've been pondering this for some time, especially whilst slowly plugging my way through Liszt's Liebestraume.

Can great sightreaders pick up a piece such as Liebestraume (previously unseen) and belt it out pause/error free? That would truly be something to witness!

The best sight-readers can play from a new score as easily as you can read out loud from a new book. I've read about Roberto Szidon being presented with obscure concertos and playing them almost perfectly from the study scores, similar to the way Liszt surprised Grieg by playing his newly-composed concerto from the manuscript. It can be done!

hi jpw101,
Are you able to support the claim?
“The best sight-readers can play from a new score as easily as you can read out loud from a new book.”

Amazingly ... any bland statement on this subject is always couched in words of reading about the sight-reading skills of the likes of a
Roberto Szidon
“playing them ALMOST perfectly from the study scores” with the usual reference to legendary Liszt and the equally legendary playing
of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor.

But strangely there is nobody on this Forum who is prepared to accept the challenge of playing a fresh piece of music off-the cuff without a
period of preparation ... even those who are blessed with a rare aural memory ( a minuscule minority) need time to identify the notes and
structure the correct fingering before being brave enough to venture a performance .

Quality performance relies on aural memory ... 99.9% of us have got “average” memories ... we need time to convert the score into a muscle
memory through dedicated practice.

Stephenc is obviously battling with the Liebestraume and is needing some boost to validate all the effort he’s putting into the playing of the seemingly easy and familiar Liszt work ... what he doesn’t realize is that the melody line in this composition is deceivingly hidden within the interweave of the broader fabric ... and has picked an extremely difficult work to sight-read and play with authority.

then music becomes like typing a letter emotionless..like a savant technically plays everything correct..but lacks the soul to really emote a musical phrase..very "dry" listening experience.. Bob

I've only heard of such things but never witnessed it first hand. My dad, a professional singer, says he works with a pianist that can do it. Looking at some of the scores out there I have a hard time believing someone could play them cold.

Even if that first time were lacking in soul it would be a heck of a skill to have....

BTB, just to clarify, I'm not trying to sight read this piece, I'm committing it measure by measure to memory.

I was just wondering whether pianists can get to such a level that sight reading such pieces from scratch is possible. I guess I'll be a disbeliever until I see it for myself. I just can't imagine someone being THAT skilful. Like you, I think 99.99% of us must diligently and repetitively practice pieces such as these to get close to mastering them.

BTW It would be great if someone on the forums took on such a challenge and proved that line of thought wrong!

"But strangely there is nobody on this Forum who is prepared to accept the challenge of playing a fresh piece of music off-the cuff without a
period of preparation ..."


There are, I expect, plenty of people on this forum and elsewhere who, on a daily basis will do just this. When I was a school teacher I had to regularly play accompaniments at sight and be prepared to transpose them. I had to score-read at sight and, for choirs, be prepared to transpose them too. I would regularly sight-read chamber music with friends just for the fun of it.

Sight-reading is a requirement of the ABRSM exams at all grades from 1 to 8. The performing and teaching diplomas at the royal colleges have sight-reading elements.

I don't know of anyone, though, who would sight-read a formal solo performance (except as a circus trick, perhaps); that would be patently absurd. And yet people on this forum assume that if there is music on the piano the pianist is sight-reading - crazy. Sight-reading is not, and never has been in spite of Liszt and a very few others, about "quality performance".


John

Drumour, are students given the oppurtunity to view/practice these pieces before their recitals?

No - sight-reading means just that, right from the start.


John

I've seen it done, admittedly not to the level of a Liszt or Szidon but certainly with pieces more difficult than the Liebestraume.

Your emphasis of the word 'almost' is interesting, it's as though anything less than perfection isn't worthy of consideration. I said I'd read about because I had - nothing amazing about that, surely. After some digging I found it:

Quoted from http://www.torgny.biz/Concerts_1.htm

Now, either you believe the author or you don't. Do you? If not, why not?


Are you his keeper? Where do you get all that from, given the original post is only a couple of lines long? How do you know what he does/doesn't realise about the melody line? I've heard of reading between the lines, but this is ridiculous...

Look, the extreme statement about like "reading out of a book" provokes needless controversy. There are indeed people whose sightreading skills are very advanced. When I was sixteen I studied with a CP at the University of Miami. She could sightread pieces better than I could play them after months of study. As a teen, that was awe inspiring. As an adult, I realize just how training and work make this possible. It's not a preternatural gift unavailable to the rest of us. If music is your life, you listen to it all the time and you thumb through music to see how it is put together as part of your job.

Earlier this week my son went to a teacher friend's house to work on the Concerto in F two piano version. After eight pages she said that she hadn't worked on the rest and asked if Anthony wanted her to sightread a bit further. Note perfect? Nope. Yet to the average pianist it would have been an amazing tour de force. We're not talking easy music here. When you play for 5-8 hours per day you just tend to get good at it!

btb,

I'm taking a sight-reading course at school. Last year, I tried reading through a few Bach chorales, and I could barely get through one measure.

Now, I am picking random 4-part chorales througout the book (371 chorales), and I can just play them perfectly all the way through, without spending a second looking at the score beforehand.


They aren't concertos, but then, I'm not technically good enough to play many concertos even with hours and hours of practice.


It is possible. Do you want a recording? Do you want proof? I won't be able to record until Thanksgiving when I go home for a few days, so I won't look at the last few pages of my chorales book until then, and record a few of them 'off-the-cuff' for you if you'd like.

Maybe someone who is a better pianist/sight-reader than I am might volunteer to record an "off-the-cuff" reading of some more difficult music.

Drumore and Pinaojerome, I know this subject has come up before but I'll ask none the less... If one would like to really improve one's sightreading ablility what would be a good regime?

Practice, practice, practice.

Buy a book of 371 chorales by Bach, and just read through them, very slowly. (very slowly at first; as you get better you can speed up)

Count out-loud.

Don't look at your hands: keep your eyes on the music. If you have to look, glance with your eyes, but don't move your head.

Learn to look one beat ahead: quickly memorize each beat before you play it so that you can already be looking ahead while you are playing. As you get better, you will be able to recognize notes and chords faster, so you will be able to look farther ahead as you are playing. (This doesn't mean stop, memorize, go, stop, memorize, go... what it means is that you are constantly playing, but instead of always focusing only on what your fingers need to do RIGHT NOW, you are always looking ahead, having already quickly read and remembered what you are playing right now - that way, you have already seen every note that you play; albeit, you have only just seen those notes a few seconds earlier. Especially when you see that you have a rest coming up, that is a GREAT opportunity to look farther ahead and remember what you have seen.) It doesn't give you a lot of preparation time, as you really are only seeing for the first time what you will be playing in a second or five seconds or ten seconds, but it certainly helps.

Practice, practice, practice.

Practice scales and arpeggios and chords without looking at your hands, so that when you are sightreading, you don't have to look away from the score to play such passages. Practice scales and apreggios and chords so that you will recognize the patterns in music when you seen them, and so that you won't have to worry about fingering.

Learn to recognize patterns: see notes as parts of chords, not just as single notes.

Practice, practice, practice.

Remember what you have already played. Remember the key signature and time signature. Remember accidentals. Remember recurring patterns. Remember harmonic progressions (if you can recognize the progressions as you are playing: we actually have to do this in my class. As we are all sight-reading together, say, a Beethoven Sonata, one of the students is assigned to shout out the chord progressions as we (and that student) sight-read the music.)

I do it every day. Instrumentalists and singers expect that their pianist should be able to play anything they put in front of them, be it a Schubert song or the Strauss Violin Sonata (which I finally agreed to play this year).

Like PJ said, once you get into the groove of sightreading a lot it becomes much easier. Like studying the piano, it's as much of a trained skill as it is innate ability.

I agree sight-reading is/can be just like reading a book, if you are willing to discount the connection of hands/eyes to actually play.

Now, think back for a minute... When reading history or (dry) ecomomic text, I would have to re-read most of the material to "learn" it, sometimes many times, over and over. And even reading for fun would lead to re-reads at times. And this is just reading, no hand/eye stuff going on.

Not too different than music, eh? Add the "playing" to the reading and it becomes more like typing (maybe a bad analogy). I know some very good typists that cannot tell you what they typed when typing dicatation/copying, etc. They go on "automatic". I would think good sight-readers do the same thing.

So, now I have talked myself out of my point - reading a book and sight reading are totally different skills.

Here's a story I heard from Orchestralist that'll blow your socks off. Ernst Von Dohnany was playing a recital at which Bartok was in the audience. Bartok brought him a score for a then new and unpublished piano sonata. Dohnany proceeded to leaf through it and handed the score back to Bartok. When it came time for an encore he played Bartok's sonata from start to finish. How's that for a feat of memory (and sight reading)????

Brendan,

Would you be able to sightread an atonal work?

That's my speciality!

it depends on music styles as well. for example, most modern pieces are almost impossible to sight read for the 1st time, and Rach's music is quite difficult to sight read as well. but Clementi, Mozart or Beethoven is relatively easy for sight reading.

these are not my opinon, but my teacher's and he's a fantastic sight reader himself. for most accompanying works or gigs, he'd just sight read everything without preperation.