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The first two versions of my website were published in 2012 and 2014. The full 2012 version (French and Polish) is still available to my students and subscribers at this link. The current version (2024) and the PDF articles it contains are being entirely updated and re-edited. For this reason, I have not yet had time to post all the previous chapters here. They will be added gradually (pages with titles in brackets are not available yet). Close...
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What is an efficient piano technique?(free access) To know a piece perfectly means to be able to play it flawlessly and without a slightest hesitation at any tempo - from the slowest to the fastest.
Allies and enemies - „Fake it until you do it” *
When playing, our greatest allies, and at the same time our greatest enemies, are our reflexes and habits, i.e. automatic, subconscious actions […] It has been proven without any doubt, although the quoted numbers may vary depending on the source, that the subconscious is many thousands times faster than the conscious mind. So all complex activities to be performed quickly and perfectly must be steered subconsciously [...] Read more >>>
How to study Chopin’s works?
One of my most vivid memories of Professor Woytowicz is the sentence he often repeated: “Chopin used to say «The same TEXT does not mean in the same WAY.»”. The point was that the repetition of a motif, phrase or fragment of a piece should not be performed mechanically in the same way as the first time. The Professor’s emphasis on this indication was very [...] Read more >>>
How to play the piano rapidly without tensing up your hand?
“It’s strange, but playing slower exposes all the errors in high relief.” This sentence was sent to me recently (2023) by one of my students by video and in fact it alone suffices to illustrate the point of my article. In other words - he who plays slowly, progresses quickly. [...] Read more >>>
Elongated fingers, bridge and crane: pedagogical inexactitudes
[...] it is more practical and easier to play by opening and closing the hand than by laboriously bending and straightening the fingers (although the latter must also be active). We simply use stronger muscles then. This very effective technique [...] Read more >>>
How to play Liszt easier and... more correctly?
In these few pages, I have included examples of fingerings and practice methods for a few selected pieces. In addition, I propose how to solve some technical and musical problems [...] Read more >>>
Pros and cons of lessons online
In my system, each lesson is recorded and archived - the student’s videos and all of my advice. Thus we can come back to them frequently, replaying former videos in order to judge our progress. The principal inconvenience of traditional live lessons is their fleeting nature - during such a lesson it is not possible to remember all of the teacher’s comments [...] Read more >>>
I have already published over a hundred videos on YouTube (not counting private ones). In many of them, I used short fragments of compositions by various composers as technical examples. I often don’t give them descriptions and they don’t appear in titles either, so it’s impossible to find them on the net. Therefore, I am publishing a list of them on this page, because some of you may find them useful [...] Read more >>>
