Balance

I can better hear the different voices of Consolation #3 when I play with my eyes closed, which I can briefly do now that I've memorized the first 2 pages. This is helping me separately pace the lines of 8th notes (and - help! - 16th notes) in the treble and the triplets in the bass.

Yuliya says to play the bass and sing the treble. This helped a lot too. She says that if I think that the pace of the singing is too slow, that means I need to speed up the piece, since it is a song.

After working on the above I played Song of the Lark and was better able to separate the bass line from the accompaniment line. Yuliya says that the latter needs to be the quietest of the three. I am starting to be able to hear what I need to do.

Flabbergasted

Am astounded to see that an incomprehensible treble passage in Lizst Consolation #3 is in fact the e flat harmonic minor scale in the treble (starting on the 5th) and the e flat minor arpeggio in the bass.

New Drills cont.

I got rather compulsive about the arpeggio drill. It consists of taking a note (in my case, C seemed like a good choice), and doing (1) the triad from that root, (2) the triad of which that note is the major 3rd (in this case the first inversion of the A flat triad), (3) the triad of which that note is the minor 3rd (in this case the first inversion of the A minor triad), (4) the triad of which C is the 5th (F, 2nd inversion), (4) the minor triad of which C is the 5th (f, 2nd inversion), (5) the C triad plus the 7th (and my book calls these "major-minor 7ths" - - I think people call them the dominant 7th, in other words a minor 3rd up from the 5th, or B flat), (5) the 7th of A flat starting with C, (6) the 7th of F starting with C, and (7) the 7th of which C is the 7th, or D's. Repeat C and c, then c dim and c augmented, then C one last time. Then I went on to D and did the same - - which took me thru D, E, F#, A flat, and B flat. And then I thought maybe I was done. But that seemed too good to be true. So I charted exactly which arpeggios this much of the drill covers, and it turns out that it's exactly half of the 7 x 13 possibilities. It looks like if I take a half-step after the B flat round and continue with B, then C#, E flat, F, etc., I'll hit them all.

Consolation for Lake Wallenstadt

Consolation #3, to be exact. Yuliya decided that was a better choice. I have actually gotten to the 6th measure on this one, further than I did on Wallenstadt.