At my last piano lesson of the winter term this year, I had a discussion with my teacher about how I want to improve as a pianist, and the main thing we both decided to improve during my next two years was how to do more than simply play a piece. I had played in a recital the week before, and I thought it went okay, but after being able to hear the recording, I realized my teacher was right when he said the way I played was “safe”. I played basically all the right notes, but it just didn’t sound very inspired. So I thought, okay, from now on I will try to be more expressive and interpret every piece more personally, rather than rely so much on what’s on the sheet music. Then I realized that’s easier said than done: there’s no way to just flip a switch inside my brain and suddenly start playing with more “emotion”, whatever that really means. Coming to Russia, I had planned to keep practicing piano, but I really wasn’t planning on trying to solve this dilemma while I was here. That was not the point of my visit, and I simply wouldn’t have the availability to practice as much as I do at home or at Carleton.

My first lesson with Viktor Ivanovich Lyadov was not easy. Even though I was playing new pieces and I expected to need a lot of help, the level of detail he went into was unlike any of my lessons in the United States. He would tell me how to improve a particular passage, I would understand what he wants me to do, then he would play it himself to show exactly what he means, then I would sit down and completely struggle. I knew exactly what I needed to do, I just couldn’t do it immediately. I could do it after several tries, and I knew when it sounded right, but it could never do something consistently. He knew this was new for me and very difficult, and I am truly grateful he has the patience of a saint.

After going over one thing for any particular passage, he would then tell me another thing I couldn’t do right off the bat, and it would all begin to stack up with several things to keep track of by the time we moved on. The prime example I can think of is when we were working on the first movement of Scriabin’s Second Sonata, specifically two lines. I remember what he said so well because these two lines are not difficult to play because there is not much going on note wise, and it is a rather slow and emotive passage but things began to escalate once we started going over it.

First off, the left hand has to be shaped in a way where the middle of the three notes in each set of three notes connected by the slurs has to be the peak of the set, but not necessarily “louder”.
He described it was sounding like a wave.

Second, the right hand has to be melodic, yet the difficulty was that only the top note of each chord in the right hand is the melody so that needs to be the loudest. I figured that having the top note be the loudest would be sufficient, but he threw me for a loop when he explained that after the top note being the loudest, the next loudest is the bottom note, and the quietest. Yet altogether, the chord has to be pianissimo. He drew a picture for me of this (as well as the previous part about the left hand) which you can see below.

Third, there was a specific way to slur the phrases that I had never done before. Usually when you slur notes, you simply play pick up your finger from the previous note as you are playing the next note so that you cannot hear any gaps between two notes. Here, he explained to me a way to slur them where you do not pick up your finger as you play the next note but instead wait a moment and then stop playing the previous note. This means that for a split second you are essentially sounding two notes at once, rather than just one after another like with normal legato.

Fourth, I was introduced to a more controlled use of the pedal. Before, I had thought there were three states the pedal could be in: all the way down, halfway down, or all the way up. He showed me the effect of sounds and textures you can get by having the pedal at much more precise intervals. Here, the ideal pedaling would be 5-25% all the way down, and at first, I didn’t believe it would do anything until he showed me himself. Using the pedal at such small but precise intervals makes it so that the sound between notes does carry over a little, but it does not become as muddy as it does when using full pedal, or even half pedal.

The last thing I remember about this section was to approach playing each hand note necessarily like I am playing piano, but as if the left hand is a cello, and the right hand is a violin. I have literally never played either of those instruments, so I was puzzled as to how to imitate them even though I agree with him that that is how this part should sound.

So all of this was for two lines which before I thought were not particularly difficult. A few of these things are applicable to other parts of the piece, but then other parts have their own approaches, as well as new things to keep track of. It was extremely difficult to not just apply all of this at once for only a few lines as we were working on it, but аlso to move on and not forget everything we had just gone over and have to start from square one on another section.

I would never have gone over anything like this in detail at probably any normal lesson in the US. I think the main difference between my lessons with Viktor Ivanovich and my lessons in the US is that my American teachers are much more hands-off than Viktor Ivanovich. I have played enough piano to learn the notes to the pieces I want to play, and so when I need help with a particularly technically difficult section they can help, but for the most part, I don’t need any help learning the notes. The main thing I think is that they don’t want to force me to play a piece in a certain way. They will offer suggestions on how to interpret a piece, but to tell me exactly how to play it would hurt the integrity of how I want to play a piece, or I how I think it should sound, and I completely understand that; however, I think that comes back to my original problem of not knowing how to play a piece with more emotion. I don’t want to be told how to interpret a piece, but at the same time, I need to know how to interpret the piece more, which doesn’t really make any sense, until now.

Viktor Ivanovich did not tell me how exactly I should play any given piece, but showed me that any given piece has more intricacies than I realize. With more details to focus on at any given moment, that gives me more control over how I want to shape those details to my liking, but actually paying attention to all those details requires magnitudes more focus than I have ever put into my practice. That is one of the main things that separates me from a professional pianist, or even a conservatory student. From now on, I am going to pay much more attention during practice, and I know that means lot more effort in order to retain and develop the things I learned from Viktor Ivanovich, but my time with him was truly a once in a lifetime experience that will help me for the rest of my life with piano.