Today, 11:00 AM, right before my piano lesson
I signed up for practice room times just this morning. Even though I tried to keep a balanced schedule I had practice sessions ranging from 30 minutes to 2 hours at a time on different days. So I will see how it all works out.
The Bach (Sinfonia No. 6) was interesting to learn. My biggest trouble spots were mm. 13-16 where the bass has a continually descending pattern loaded with skips and steps. Sometimes these 3-note series of such intervals repeated a second time before continuing downward, whereas others did not. The other trouble spot I had was the soprano line toward the end on the Sinfonia. It had a wacky melody (in the Baroque sense) which was loaded with syncopation. The longest and strongest note occurred on the the 3rd subdivision of each beat, with 16th notes filling up the other two beats. It took me awhile to figure it out, since my current assignment was to play each of the three melodic lines of the Sinfonia separately.
Gershwin just simply knows how to write harmony. I enjoying sort of going through bits and pieces of I Got Rhythm and relished playing the harmonies that went with the melody. For example, in mm. 20-21, the AATB goes from C-flat, G-flat, D-natural, A-flat to B-flat, F, D-flat, G-natural with E flat in the soprano in m. 21 (the key was D-flat major) just rubs me rightly. Needless to say, I didn't spend too much time on it; I more or less learned the first page and the last 10 measures of the song. I had more pressing concerns I needed to address.
The E major and C# minor scales weren't too bad. I still used a metronome, mostly to help me coordinate the two hands.
I knew Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata 1st movement (I started it over the summer), but I still had much clutter to clear up. I still had problems keeping the triplets quiet and bringing out the meoldy, played mostly with the ring and pinky fingers of my right hand. I didn't have so much trouble with my ring finger; the pinky still played pretty weakly (retroactive to elbow problems off and on last year?). For example, when I would put my thumb on the C# and my pinky on the D an octave higher, you'd hear the C#-F#-A triplet pretty clearly, but not the D so much. It's stuff like that, and much more, that I hope to correct.