Piano lesson was surprisingly easy today. By easy I don't mean that I played very well, or that the improvements I was told to make are very easy to achieve. It just felt more relaxed than any lesson I've ever had in these three years... yep, time really flies, it's my third year learning from Ms Ching! Maybe I was more relaxed after that unexpected great leap in learning Messiaen on Monday, but somehow I felt that she was milder today.

When she usually would have been frustratedly nagging at me, today she merely said something like, "I believe I told you this before..." That was when she told me to join the top notes of the chords in Beethoven's Sonata Op.78. AHHH yet another stupidly ignored detail! It always happens that these small details become so obvious after she tells me. Argh. When I was practising I simply overlooked the top notes of those chords... of course I've had my fair share of naggings about how creating a legato melody isn't just about using the pedal to join the notes together, it's about first making the melody legato by using fingerings that don't require the lifting up of the hand before the end of the phrase etc. But I never applied this to the chords! They are full chords k, four notes in a hand! So I never gave a thought to joining the top notes. Yet after she said it, it suddenly dawned on me that I was so silly not to have seen the top notes of the chords as a melodic line as well. But it makes the Beethoven so much more challenging now. I tested out many new ways of playing those chords just now, but none of them seem to work! Even when I'm playing so slowly now, it's already sounding awkward and hesitant... it's not going to be a breeze trying to make it sound smooth when I speed up next time!

But the lesson was also one of the more productive ones I've had. When she demonstrated shaping the left-hand accompaniment of the first few bars of the sonata, it was like I'd been playing the piano with my ears tightly shut and suddenly they spring open and I finally hear what's going on in the piece. Haha that sentence sounds so dramatic and kua zhang! Lol sorry, I couldn't come up with a more subtle description of how I felt. I just suddenly realised that all the expressive melodies have to be supported by equally expressive accompaniment... I think she said something like, "it's useless for the right hand to try so hard to be expressive when the left hand is just playing the notes of the accompaniment without any effort to shape the phrase. For example, if the cello section were to be playing the left-hand line, they would definitely not play it like how you played it. They would shape the line even though it's just an accompaniment to the melody played by some other instrument, because every single section in the orchestra has to have character." It was another one of those speechless moments when I'd think, "Oh ya! I go to concerts, I enjoy listening to the orchestra etc... why on earth didn't I realise that and apply it to my piano playing?!"

Messiaen's Prelude No.8 was a little less productive. Yes, I noticed that his works have that "glass-like" quality probably stemming from his obsession with stained glass... but I haven't succeeded in make my playing sound like it's supposed to. So she just made me listen to his wife's recording of the piece. (I think her name is Yvonne L????... I'm so totally hopeless and clueless about many performers! Argh!) The recording sounded quite similar to my Angela Hewitt one... just that the older recording methods changed its quality a little. I still can't figure out how to produce that "glass-like" tone, other than accidentally succeeding in a few notes here and there.

Got so much more to work on now...