Author: The Cross-Eyed Pianist
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Make friends with the music
Too often it seems that we view learning, studying, practising and performing music as a kind of fight. People talk about “doing battle with Beethoven” or “fighting the fear” (of performing) as if one must take up arms against unseen, powerful forces. It’s true that learning new repertoire can be a Herculean task, and practising…
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A welcome return to teaching
I have always loved music and I adore the piano. Teaching allows me to share my passion and, I hope, to encourage a similar enthusiasm in my students. Fundamentally, the piano journey should be about enjoyment and self-fulfilment. Giving students permission to be less than perfect, liberating them from old-fashioned or limiting attitudes to learning…
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Piano Lessons in Portland, Dorset
Frances Wilson LTCL is an experienced piano teacher offering private lessons for teenagers and adults in her home in Portland, Dorset.
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An Autumn Sonata – the finale
The final instalment in a series of essays exploring my personal independent study of Schubert’s penultimate piano sonata. This essay first appeared in The Schubertian (April 2018), the journal of the Schubert Institute UK. O thrice romantic master, wouldn’t you like to stroll under the cherry blossom with your love in the daytime and listen…
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‘March’ from The Seasons by Doug Thomas
Interesting things come from online connections – and this is one of the nicest (if rather energetic!) projects I’ve been involved in thanks to a Twitter/Facebook connection with composer Doug Thomas Doug composed ‘March’ for me as part of his year-long composing project called The Seasons, a homage to Tchaikovsky’s suite of 12 piano pieces…
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Thoroughly Good Podcast
I was delighted to take part in Jon Jacob’s Thoroughly Good Podcast project with composer Thomas Hewitt Jones (who happens to be one of the first people to feature in my Meet the Artist series). We met in the crypt bar at St John’s Smith Square (one of my favourite music venues in London) to…
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An Autumn Sonata – a personal journey through Schubert’s penultimate piano sonata: the Andantino and the Scherzo
This article first appeared in The Schubertian (No 97 January 2018), the journal of The Schubert Institute (UK) Startling contrasts – the Andantino and the Scherzo The second movement of the Sonata in A, D959, marked Andantino, is quite unlike anything else that Schubert wrote. Described by pianist Jonathan Biss as “a composed hallucination”, it…
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An Autumn Sonata – a personal journey through Schubert’s penultimate piano sonata
This article, the first of five, was first published in the July 2017 issue of The Schubertian, the journal of the Schubert Institute (UK). In the autumn of 2014 I set myself the task of learning Schubert’s penultimate piano sonata, No 20 in A, D959, composed in 1828. My intention was to learn and finesse…
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Off The Podium podcast
Armenian-American conductor Tigran Arakelyan, creator of the Off The Podium podcast series, interviews Frances Wilson, pianist, piano teacher, writer and author of The Cross-Eyed Pianist, about her unusual path into piano teaching, the creation of her blog, concerts and concert reviewing, “changing the vocabulary” in teaching, and more….. More about Off The Podium and links…
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Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A, D959
The Sonata in A, D959, is the middle panel of the triptych of Franz Schubert’s final sonatas. Schubert completed his final three piano sonatas in September 1828, just a few months before his death at the age of 31, and he numbered the three sonatas sequentially, perhaps envisioning them as a cycle. After his death,…
FRANCES WILSON 