Did you ever ask yourself whether your piano practicing is in fact efficient? Or have you ever had the feeling that your exercises on the keyboard are just a boring routine you daily repeat while not knowing why you do it?
Remember first: Practicing means exploring every unknown detail of the score you are studying; it is like disclosing the secret of music and discovering the unlimited power of the composers´masterworks.
A good approach to your daily practice should include a Prelude and Fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier by J.S.Bach. This repertoire represents the absolute fundamental work for a pianist.
Studying meticulously Preludes and mostly Fugues by Bach requires a high concentration, especially when pointing out the plurality of voices (polyphony) relating together through counterpoint. This is the basis of efficient practicing and, in the long term, the perfect construction of high professional piano playing.
After your first approach with Bach, choose a piece [...]

Continuing in featuring great pianists among the “Immortals” we want to pay homage to another excellent, unique and inimitable artistic personality: Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.
What characterized the particular style of playing and interpretation that made Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli so unforgettable?
He was obsessed with technical perfection and totally exact reproduction of the score.
His devotion to the music was incredibly deep, it is known that he spent hours and hours on his practicing sessions.
I had my first impression of Benedetti Michelangeli when I was a student at the music conservatory of my home town Cagliari. My father told me a lot about this pianist, trying to motivate me to practice more like he did.
I first listened to some of his recordings, I remember to be quite impressed about his Brahms-Paganini Variations and Bach-Busoni Chaconne. Later I literally admired his recording of Ravel Piano Concerto G Major and Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto G [...]

“I practice very industriously…” – Quote Ferruccio Busoni, Letters to his wife 1895-1907, London, Edward Arnold & Co. http://www.rodoni.ch/busoni/bibliotechina/letteregerdaEN/gerdaEN1.html

Do these words of Ferruccio Busoni sound familiar to you? They certainly do, especially if you are a pianist with your heart and soul like Busoni was. He was the pianists´pianist, the musicians´musician. To be as good as he was, or at least if you want to play with his virtuosity and to have a profound knowledge about piano playing, you have to do only a simple thing: practice!
Oh my God, this terribly sounding word…our teachers threatened us with it, I am sure that the more your piano teacher repeated this word during the lessons, the less you wanted to do it.
I practiced up to seven hours a day during the time of my former music education, not only because my teachers said that, but also because I felt that spending many [...]