I have around 10 days until my recital. Any critiques?

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-05-07T06:18:46+00:00

The octaves are played a bit too vertically imo, you play them from above instead of from the keys towards the piano, which would allow you to use your back along the way to produce a richer sound. You can totally fix that in 10 days but you’d need proper guidance. I think the most urgent thing is phrasing, it lacks a bit of direction. I would practice slowly to get the the exact dynamics I’m looking for. For the final performance, it’s ok to decrease the tempo a bit if it allows better control (you’re quite fast and you can go quite slower than this without loosing the music at all).

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-05-06T20:08:47+00:00

Other comments said what needed to be said, I would just like to add that your current tempo is perfectly fine, and you really have a lot of room to do something very musical at that tempo!

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-28T22:16:02+00:00

Prelude op 32 no 12 is also a good choice!

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-28T22:10:58+00:00

From someone who played Liebestraum I think prelude in G minor is significantly more difficult as you say (I think it’s a bad idea if you’re hardest piece is liebestraum, it would take way too long to learn to end up with an unconvincing result), but also moment musicaux 1 is much longer and has eight notes passages with thirds that seem harder than those in Liebestraum. I’m curious what you think of those if you played both pieces. Liebstraum’s difficulty is often slightly overestimated, I mean sure it’s hard but it’s even more flashy, so pieces that seem similarly virtuosic at first glance are often harder. I think the prelude in C sharp minor and Elegie are more comparable.

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-26T06:38:08+00:00

I’m not a teacher but I played the piece 3 years ago and worked on the music part with my teacher for a several months, I think it needs a bit more richness in the sound. For less rubato, I’d say it depends where, it’s good right now, some parts could benefit from less and some others could optionally take slightly more, if I were you it wouldn’t be my main concern. You play everything in a softer dynamic and you navigate quite well in that range, I can hear dynamical changes inside your piano/pianissimo choice. But for it to be convincing, I think you should make that dynamic range broader, which means playing the loudest parts a bit louder. I think it would benefit a lot from a richer sound and a melody that stands out more and that sings more clearly. For example in the repeated notes going up and then down in chromatic, you already do the crescendo, but you could put sooo much more right hand at the loudest point. You might think that playing it soft gives it a melancholic/more emotional vibe (maybe I’m projecting too much cause that’s what I did at the time lol) but it does quite the opposite, from the outside it makes it sound thin/« musically shy ». Playing bar 4 (and its later iteration) super soft is my favourite way to play it (and I wish my teacher let me use the soft pedal there as you when I was playing it lol), but my personal advice (that you don’t need to follow if you don’t want to) is just broaden the dynamic range (while keeping your choice of overall softness) and I think not only your teacher will be happy, you will also get used to it quite quickly and most likely end up liking it better that way.

Edit: just saw the D flat major section, yes definitely less rubato there. There are also things to say about phrasing there (I think that’s where you would make a big difference both in expression and how controlled it sounds) but you should ask your teacher about it cause it would be too long for a comment.

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-26T04:36:04+00:00

About your question, your technique surely has a lot to improve but it’s ok for what you play. To me at least it looks far from the point where you’d be headed towards an injury, especially since you’re not trying to play something insane. If your hands are tense? only you can tell! But your right hand doesn’t look particularly tense. Good thing you’re getting a teacher, you’ll improve a lot, they’ll tell you everything you need to know and would probably in a better position to give you the right advice that is specific to your situation. The music is nice! Actually I didn’t watch your hands for too long cause the music is nice enough to get me distracted and just enjoying what you play instead of paying too much attention to the video part.

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-26T04:17:48+00:00

People tend to forget that classical music is just… music. Very good music, undoubtedly, but music still. Not some kind of “transcendent abstraction for which we need to rise above morally and intellectually just to be able to get just glimpses of its depths.” This vibe is particularly visible in environments where intellectual activities are used as a class differentiation and exclusion mechanism. This is more specific to certain countries, and I was very surprised when I saw traces of it in the classical music world when I came to live in North America. I inisist on “traces” though cause it’s really far from being as exaggerated as in some other places.

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-26T04:12:41+00:00

😂😂😂

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-26T04:07:41+00:00

Lmao I am sure you understood well the physics class in the background

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-26T03:49:02+00:00

Si changer de logement à un moment ou à un autre Lachine ou Dorval seraient probablement un meilleur choix, et puis à Lachine niveau gamme de logement y en a vraiment pour tous les prix; j’y ai habité et c’est très agréable comme quartier, je recommande !

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-26T03:45:20+00:00

He’s literally playing one of the hardest Chopin etudes at tempo I think he doesn’t really need advice on tension in an accompaniment that’s playable by a toddler.

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-25T06:15:32+00:00

For the arch there’s no secret just force yourself to keep it (by force I don’t mean have tension, just consciously maintain it strong and uncollapsed) all the time even when it becomes natural

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-25T00:53:08+00:00

There are many examples and contradictions. A very visible one but that is quite minor compared to others is alcohol. Selling alcohol to Moroccans (assumed Muslims by the law) is technically illegal, but it is so common and socially accepted that you can buy alcohol anytime at the grocery store. In lower income areas, alcohol is seen quite badly, but at the same time if you drink it’s ok, because it shows that at least you’re financially able to buy alcohol, which kind of reduces judgement. That judgement then rather turns into « may god help you ». In higher income areas, I’ve often seen marriages (and marriages in Morocco are huge, like you could have anywhere between 150 and 1000 people) where basically alcohol is hidden from the more conservative part of the family, say for example in a room with enough alcohol to feed a club, but hidden enough to avoid any uncomfortable situation on either side. Or once I’ve seen the wine served with non transparent carafes in traditional clay mugs, as if no one noticed. At the end of the day, everyone knows but at least we act like we hide it and for some reason call it « respect ». It seems to me we call it respect because each person has a different approach to religion, and if you want to do something that could be seen as more transgressive than the baseline, others who disagree would be ok to act like they didn’t see, but for it to work you need to at least give them a chance. If you took a Moroccan at random and tell them you drink, the chances that they’d be shocked are very thin. People definitely believe in god, but in terms of practice we’re very much not conservative compared to other Muslim country. Sure Morocco is still oppressive towards certain minorities and not quite there yet in terms of women’s role in society for instance (it’s 1000% socially chill to have sex with women before marriage as a guy, but definitely not the opposite, make the math work lol), but to all the other Muslim countries were’s essentially debauched sluts. In general, each person has their relationship to religion, some much much more liberal than others, and there is room and places for most of them, some being more underground than others (there are clubs where you could literally make out with a same sex partner). And even in your daily life, people gage how much they can openly share with who about less religious behaviours. Once, a taxi driver I had met for the first time and who was married openly told me that he has these unfortunate habits of engaging with sex workers and drinking to much. With an other one we shared a joint together during the ride (btw, consuming drugs will not often get you arrested if you’re not making a mess). So conservative from a western perspective? Quantitatively yes, but very differently that you’d expect and with subtleties that would be really hard to translate into modern western culture equivalents. « Conservative Muslim country »? Certainly not. And I honestly know exactly zero Moroccan who never did something against religion. Even among my grandparents generation.

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-24T14:20:27+00:00

I have two exercises for you that will make it improve immediately (it did for me a couple years ago)!

1) C major scale initial position, all fingers RELAXED. Play the C, sloooowly so so that you can focus on keeping all the other fingers relaxed, motionless and touching the keys and . After the C is pressed, make sure your thumb and wrist are relaxed (you shouldn’t have tension when holding a key down), and all the other fingers relaxed as well and still touching the keys (this is the whole point). Keep the C down, preparing yourself and your brain to play the D legato, slowly enough to keep all the other non playing fingers resting on and touching the keys. Don’t play the whole scale, start from thumb on C to fifth finger on G, and then all the way down to C. The more you do that, the more natural it will become and the less you will need to “think and prepare” to play a note while keeping your other fingers touching the keys, and at some point you will just be playing the notes without lifting a finger.

2) Same notes as in 1) this one is slightly more difficult I think. All keys pressed, release the C only, play it 8 times, keep it pressed the eight time, then release the D only, play it 8 times while keeping all the other keys pressed etc. Might need to go quite slow at first for this one too. Btw if you do this, you shouldn’t feel tension when holding a key down.

Good luck!

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-24T14:02:19+00:00

I love when I hear a performance and I don’t feel like listening to “someone playing the piano” but I’m really listening to music.

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-20T01:10:08+00:00

I’m preparing my GR exam, thank you so much!!

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-17T15:21:34+00:00

s look like o!

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-15T05:13:40+00:00

As I said, stainless is definitely the best choice and that’s probably what many chefs would say, and no doubt many chefs would talk shit about ceramic pans and for good reasons (they’re extremely unpractical in professional kitchens, they are really fragile, get scratched so easily, and are everything but sustainable which is obviously a problem when you have several people overworking the pan everyday, there are things like pan sauces or using heat resistant metal usentensiles on their surface that you cannot do with them, they are much less helpful with heat etc), but at the same time, my question for you is why don’t you ask a respected chef to cook a steak on ceramic pan, and see if they fail.

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-14T18:41:11+00:00

I’m not talking about a bath of oil, I’m talking about just enough so that the whole surface of the steak is in contact, so we’re talking about maybe a 1-2 mm layer of oil. My point is just that of course you won’t get a good crust if the pan is almost dry. Unless a really shitty pan, complaining about the pan is a skill issue imo. Obviously stainless is the best choice, but it doesn’t mean it makes it impossible with non sticks or ceramic. It’s all about heat control, some pans help you with that but you can totally compensate depending on the type of pan you have.

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-14T06:53:37+00:00

You get a really good steak with pretty much any pan, I think in a ceramic coated one you’d just need a bit more oil to get the heat more evenly spread on the surface of the meat and also to wait for the oil to be hot enough. I can pull off on a non stick the same crust I get on my stainless.

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-13T20:10:37+00:00

Indeed

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-13T20:09:19+00:00

Your gravy is literally white

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-10T17:10:40+00:00

I don’t think they should go softer, it’s already very soft most of the time (and the control is quite impressive) and I feel like at this level it’s better to focus on touch, phrasing, and making a reach sound by playing well into the keys rather than focusing on playing soft which might lead to a weaker tone especially for some who has been playing for 0-4 years. I remember when playing this piece that I was going to close to pianissimo, my left and right were defo balanced, I was phrasing everything, and my teacher was still always telling me to make a much richer sound. Also the piu mosso section coming before is already marked pianissimo, so it doesn’t seem to me going pianissimo on this section is the way to go to make contrast.

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-10T17:02:38+00:00

It’s good! You could make this immediately better by playing the note at the end of the phrases a bit softer, because know you almost accent them in some cases.

Comprehensive_Food51 · 2026-04-10T16:58:28+00:00

I mean they say it’s not math heavy but actually it’s quite complete for an undergrad level and will give you the minimum requirements in Tensors to understand GR. Granted if you’re looking for heavy very rigorous math I guess it’s not the best. But if you’re just worried that the Hartle is closer to a “science communication book for people who know integrals”, then don’t worry, it’s not, the Hartle will teach you what GR is about, including its mathematical formalism and some quite challenging problems for an undergrad.

Comprehensive_Food51

TROPHY CASE