Playing from the score of a piano work without having seen it before is called sight
reading. Liszt sight read Brahms’s E flat minor Scherzo and part of his C major Sonata,
and also Grieg’s Piano Concerto, from the manuscript scores. Sight reading is a very
useful skill to have and is tested in music examinations.
There are many graded sight reading books and, of course, a vast piano repertoire. One
can play piano duets or accompany a friend who sings or plays an orchestral instrument.
When practising sight reading, choose the tempo carefully based on the piece as a whole.
Spend half a minute to examine the key and time signatures, tempo, rhythm, dynamics,
accidentals, tied notes and legato and staccato touches. Keep your eyes on the music and
look ahead, aiming to take several bars at a glance, noting patterns such as repeated
rhythms and passages built on scales or chords. Imagine how the music will sound
before you play it and when playing it give rhythm priority over complete correctness of
notes.
SILBERMANN
In 1711 an Italian writer named Scipione Maffei wrote an enthusiastic article about
Cristofori’s piano including a diagram of the mechanism. The article was widely
distributed and most of the next generation of piano builders started their work because of
reading it.
One of the builders who read the article was Gottfried Silbermann who is better known
nowadays as an organ builder. Silbermann’s pianos were direct copies of Cristofori’s
with one important addition: Silbermann invented the forerunner of the modern damper
pedal which lifts all the dampers off the strings at once.
Silbermann showed Bach one of his early instruments in the 1730s but Bach thought that
the higher notes were too soft to allow a full dynamic range. He did, however, approve
of a later piano in 1747 and even served as an agent in selling Silbermann’s pianos.
SILOTI
Alexander Siloti was born in Kharkov on 9 October 1863 and died in New York on 8
December 1945. He studied with Nicholas Rubinstein, Sverev and Tchaikovsky, and
with Liszt at Weimar during the period 1883-86. Siloti was one of the founders of the
Liszt Society in Leipzig in 1885. He toured throughout the United States and Europe, but
taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1887 to 1890, and conducted in Russia from
1901 to 1919. Concert programmes from 1903 to 1913 show that he performed many of
Liszt’s piano works in St Petersburg during this period. He went to the United States in
1922, where he taught at the Juilliard School in New York from 1924 to 1942.
He wrote many piano transcriptions and arrangements and a short book ‘My Memories of
Liszt’. His cousin Rachmaninoff dedicated his first piano concerto and his Preludes op.