Piano Video Lesson: The Secret to Executing Trills

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin, today with secrets to executing trills.

You know, when I was in music conservatory, I remember the really advanced students would spend an inordinate amount of time working on trills.

And in fact, it's one aspect of my playing that I have developed further in this past year or so, and all is discovering new things. Now, I have videos about trills, and the most intrinsically important thing about trills is trills must be measured.

I know when you hear a trill...

It just sounds like a whole bunch of random notes and then it ends. But you know what? If you don't know exactly how many notes you're playing in a trill, good luck ending it. Because you may end up on the right note to end the trill, you have a 50 -50 chance of being on the right note or the wrong note. So you have to figure out exactly how many notes you're playing. So even though it sounds like a flurry of notes, it's all worked out precisely the number of notes, whether it's that or... or... or...

So those are all different executions of the trill with different number of notes, but each one being measured.

So today I'm going to talk about... I always call it a hack because I recently performed a concert in New York, and I played the Mozart Sonata K 457 in C minor, and it's loaded with trills. And I wanted to execute those trills really cleanly. And I wanted to also play a good number of notes. You know, you can always play an easier trill. I showed you some simpler trills. That's the trill to the famous Mozart Sonata K 545 in C major.

Or all different trills and the end of the piece, the end of the exposition, has that longer trill.

But the Mozart Sonata that I'm talking about in C minor has trills all over the place.

And I'm going to show you the beginning of that so you can get an idea of the opening trills, which are tough. And I started my program with a sonata, so I wanted to be rock solid on it. And I figured out a way, and I'm going to share it with you in a minute. First, I want you to hear the trills and listen to how clean they come out.

There's a lot of notes in a little bit of time. Now of course they're measured, but how to be faithful and accurate on them. And it's not just in trills like this. It's in virtually all ornamentation. I'm going to demonstrate with another piece in a minute too.

The secret is lifting up your finger just a little bit.

Instead of being right on the keys, you lift up the finger just a little bit before you play the trill.

And that little bit of lifting articulates the trills so wonderfully. You can't believe it. Try it with your playing. Wherever you have trills, just lift the finger just before the trill and you'll get a clean trill by having that start. Because if your fingers don't lift up, the notes don't replay. That's the hardest part of a trill. As I've explained on the piano numerous times, that the hardest part about piano playing and finger work isn't so much the pushing down of fingers, it's the lifting up. Lifting up of previously played fingers. So a trill, having the fingers come up high enough. Otherwise if you try to play a trill and the fingers come up, obviously you can't trill, can you? So that's the secret. I'm going to demonstrate with a different piece that has just a very simple ornamentation. It's not even a complete trill, but it works in the Cacciaturian folk song I believe it's called. I can't even remember what it's called. It's called different things in different books. It's all translated. But you'll recognize it. I'm going to play the end of it where it has some ornamentation and notice the lifting that I do in order to make it clean.

So by lifting, you are certain that the fingers are up and out of the way so the key can replay.

That's the secret. It's being able to get the previously played fingers up and out of the way so the key is up so it can go down again. Simple physics really.

So try lifting with your trills just before you play them and see how you get cleaner execution of your ornamentation in your playing. I hope it works for you. Let us know in the comments here at LivingPianos .com and YouTube. Thanks again for joining me. If you haven't subscribed to LivingPianos.com we have newsletters that come out twice a week with fresh videos as well as articles you'll really enjoy. Thanks again for joining me. We'll see you next time.

Bye.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/the-secret-to-executing-trills/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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