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Hi, does anyone know how do the great pianists practice??. Do they just practice their pieces slowly? or do they use rhythmic patterns?. does anyone know?. thanks

As promised , here's my reply:
Look up www.pianostreet.com and type 'How did great pianists practice?' in the white search box on the top right. You'll get a long thread of lots of interesting facts......

a lot, and focussed.

Last summer at piano camp, one of the instructors who had been a student at the Peabody Institute, described hearing someone playing one the grand pianos very beautifully but painfully slowly. She could not see who it was but her friend said, "Do you know who that is? That's Murray Perahia!" I once read something similar about Rachmaninoff. I consider my own teacher to be a great pianist and he practices slowly when needed and definitely recommends patterns.

Richter:

What he said: 3 hours a day, at tempo most of the time, learning one page at a time.

In reality: far more than 3 hours per day, often after concerts, very slowly, and learning one page at a time.

I heard Richard Goode practice once. I swear he stayed on one passage for an hour... Maybe 8 bars long. Just a bit under tempo.

You have to find what works best for you, you have to KNOW what works best for you.

I've heard some of them brag a bit about how little they practice, though I think that's showboating a bit and it sometimes annoys me when I hear them say that. I'm always sort of intrigued when I see Martha Argerich in interviews because she seems so flighty and a bit scattered. I was watching one where she was rambling on about being late to a performance and how she'd learned Tchaikovsky's first concerto (I think it was) in two weeks because she always waits til the last minute. Jascha Heifetz said he didn't practice more than two hours (which I think was also untrue). I read an interview that said he likes to wander around taking photographs instead of practicing for hours on end. I think perhaps they say that to show off that it comes so naturally to them and that their skill is something intrinsic rather than the result of hard work. The deceptive bit is, however intrinsically gifted they are, at some point or another they put in a lot of grueling work in to get where they were.

I bet their practice methods vary from person to person, but across the board I think the approach is one of intense focus. In the book the Mastery of Music, the author interviewed a lot of great modern musicians (Joshua Bell, Yo Yo Ma) and several of them mentioned that they practice at painstakingly slow tempos. One mentioned that he listens for "the space between notes" and tries to get rid of all the fuzz and extraneous material. It's a bit like Rodin or whoever who said he created those great scultures by just carving away the bits that weren't the Thinker. It's an interesting read if you really want to comb through some different virtuoso musicians' thought processes.

Intelligently.

Shura Cherkassky - VERY slowly. About one note per second. Always making sure his finger is in the centre of the key. (Rachmaninoff did this as well)

Mischa Dichter - 8 to 12 hours a day.. up to tempo but always in small "impulse" groups.

Stephen Hough - finger work different rhythmic patterns. 30% of his practice time spent on pedal and coloristic effects.

Boris Berman - never in rhythms, just under tempo.

Ricther - same passage, at tempo, 100 or 200 times in a row.

David Bar-Illan - "Silent Practice" - SO slowly that the key goes down but no sound comes out.

Ruth Slyencska - 90% with the metronome, increasing speed one notch at a time.

Hmmmm......I knew I've been doing something wrong all these years !!

They practice in the way that works best for them and gets them their desired results. If you aren't getting yours, and assuming you already have good technique, change the way you practice. Eventually, you will find the right formula.

Well that's certainly his business, but 8 to 12 hours? That seems a bit excessive to me.

When Busoni was touring he once wrote to his wife that he heard a pianist practise a passage from the Liszt A major Concerto all night. He simply inquired: 'is that talent?'

just the quote I was thinking of, Deborah


such threads are fun when you keep handy a big list of quotes









every day (Rubinstein had a similar - and funny - quote I enjoyed that included his wife)

What about visualization, mental practising ? I'm surprised no one ever talk about that. I'd have thought it was quite common amongst famous professional musicians.
I'm under the impression that it's more common in the organ world (of which I know very little, I've just discussed a few times with the organ teacher at my conservatory).

In his book "Practising the piano", Franck Marrick mentions it.

Thomas Edison: "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration".

Many amateur (and even professional) musicians believe that the astounding technique of some of the virtuosi they hear is God-given (or genetic, for atheists like me ).
But the reality is that what separates a pianist with a virtuoso technique from one with a mediocre technique is the amount of hours they put into practising. I read a study some years ago on teenage musicians which found that those who won prizes and got into conservatoires were the ones who practised a lot more, and more consistently (like everyday, not just 5 days/week etc).

Of course, you still need talent to make it to the top. But talent alone won't get you there. And those who made it to the top can still falter: Walter Gieseking was famous for relying on his talent rather than practising, but you can hear the results even in his studio recordings (Debussy and Ravel, for instance). Ditto for Alfred Cortot.

And to take one recent example: Benjamin Grosvenor was, until 8 or 9, just another talented young pianist. Then he realized that his peers were playing better than him, and decided to really practise properly - 4 hours/day or more. Coupled with his innate musicianship, within a few years, he came to the attention of the musical cognoscenti, but even when he won the piano section of the BBC competition at 11, his technique was still inferior to those of some of the other (older) piano finalists, and not in the virtuoso class, unlike the typical Russian or Chinese prodigy at the same age. It was his practising that allowed him to become a virtuoso, and play the Liszt Sonata and Ravel's Gaspard within just another few years, and thus ensured that he wasn't yet another of those (alas, all-too-common) British pianists known principally for their 'musicianship' (often an euphemism for 'inability to play really difficult repertoire'), but a virtuoso pianist who is up there with the best in the world, just as happy in Liszt as in Bach.

I'm not a professional pianist, but I studied music, and my piano teacher at university taught me the following:

When you have a difficult passage, practise it with a metronome, verrrry slowly. When you can play it, gradually increase the tempo.

My first piano teacher taught me to first learn each hand separately, and only when I master each hand well, combine them.

Maybe using a combination of both techniques is not a bad idea.

There's a huge difference between saying a lot of practicing is necessary to be a great pianist and saying it is sufficient. A study like the one you mention only says it is necessary, which very few deny. It's totally debatable whether it's sufficient and my strong view is it's not sufficient.

There's no way of knowing whether his practicing was the main reason his technique improved as opposed to his natural ability. His technique, if it was inferior to older pianists in the competition when he was 12, could simply have been so since he was younger and had less time to practice it. Trying to assign some percentage to talent and practice fruitless. It was his great musical qualities(which I think are less teachable) beyond technique that made him such a great pianist at such a young age.

I totally agree that very slow practice is an absolute necessity when the piece of music is new to you. I spend 90% of my time in this mode because I'm always playing something new.

But I find it hard to believe that a top classical pianist needs to practice at glacially slow tempi the repertoire they have had ingrained for 20 or 30 years. Yes, if you haven't touched a particular piece in a couple of years, you might slow it down SOME.

I mean, come on, the accumulation of experience must account for something!

There's no way of knowing whether his practicing was the main reason his technique improved as opposed to his natural ability. His technique, if it was inferior to older pianists in the competition when he was 12, could simply have been so since he was younger and had less time to practice it. Trying to assign some percentage to talent and practice fruitless. It was his great musical qualities(which I think are less teachable) beyond technique that made him such a great pianist at such a young age. [/quote]


Heinrihch Neuhaus told: The musical development SHOULD GO AHEAD of technical development, or at the same level if possible.

So that he was TECHNICALLY a little bit later says notghing. Dudes, they are kinds. They are growing. Their body is changing each day. So we cannot be sure about him, but having a big musicality, technique is just matter of practice. It doesn't work opposite way.

Thank you! That was a wonderful collection!