Sir Thomas Allen takes care to ensure that everyone who wants to hear him can do so, and peforms to the same standard in a school hall as at the Royal Opera House. Last weekend he was at St Christopher's hospice in Sydenham, and the person sitting next to me happened to be a professional pianist. I mentioned to her that I was having trouble practising slowly enough, and she said that she also had to practice extremely slowly, sometimes even stopping with her hands in the correct position when she had to play difficult pieces.
Patrick has told me something between 500 and 1,000 times that I go too quickly, and this is probably going to prevent me from playing as I would like to unless I can stop it. As soon as I manage to play part of a piece properly, I tend to speed up on that part, creating uneveness. Following this conversation with my kind neighbour, I've moved to seeing how slowly I can manage to play, with the idea of getting all of the information from the score into my mind without the pressure that leads to jerky playing. It seems to be working - my Mozart sonata is a little better, and I'm playing things by Fanny Waterman, who puts pianistic technique into the simplest pieces, with more confidence.
Catherine Edwards' lovely new recording of Stanford's music for violin and piano ls here.