Get back to your music lessons after your holidays
After a long and well-deserved summer holidays break, our piano students come back with their energies renewed and ready to come back for lessons, and that sounds all great until you first seat at the piano. The first thing we notice is that the pieces that we have been preparing with your Piano Tutor for many months now surprisingly are not sounding as fluent and confident as when you left it before taking holidays! no worries, that is absolutely normal and it happens to us all, even the piano teachers.
What we know, based on previous experiences, is that it takes a little while to our fingers to come back to the “finesse” we achieved by daily repetition. Usually, we don’t realize how complex to play the piano (or any instrument for that matter) truly comprises, and we have to have the patience and the resilience to get back to our daily routine and get back our “stamina”.
The best way to do this according to Maestro Juan Rezzuto is through scales, he says in his article “Try and work on experimenting with different articulations and with various dynamics. You can, for example, play staccato and then try the same scale in legato. You will see that this will affect the piano movement you can use -wrist movement or finger movement respectively-. When dealing with dynamics, I suggest you play them from piano to forte and vice-versa. You can also play the entire scale forte and then try and play it only in piano. Make sure than you don’t change the movement of your choice when incrementing or diminishing the intensity of your action.”
Here you can find another related article from Juan Rezzuto that also talks about how to practice scales:
https://www.piano-composer-teacher-london.co.uk/post/three-approaches-to-scales
And another one, from Gisela Paterno that guides you more into the rhythmic approach that he mentions in this previous article that might be very helpful to get back on track and see how fast and easy, is to go back to your previous level!