I spent much of 2025 playing Schubert’s Piano Sonata in C minor, written shortly before he died in 1828 at the age of 31. I first learned this sonata in my late teens and have continued to return to it, even more regularly as I reached and passed the unsettling milestone of Schubert’s own age at his death. By now, I feel I know the topography of the piece as if it were an object I could pick up and turn over in my hand. Yet, on every revision, the task of bringing to life the dreamlike universe it contains seems more monumental, with an inexhaustible store of new details and connections to discover. Containing these intricacies within the narrative arc of the piece is the work of a lifetime.
Since first climbing onto a piano stool at the age of four, I have spent well over 50,000 hours practising; incomparably more time in the company of my piano than with any person. Of course, this is quite normal across many disciplines which also require a physical element of training, such as dance or sport. I recently read an interview with Serena Williams in which she discussed her love for the game of tennis but bemoaned the millstone of her training regime. By contrast, I find that I love practising more and more, in all the various practical and esoteric forms it can take. Arriving at the piano in the morning gives a comfortingly monastic shape to at least part of my day and insists upon certain parameters in my life. Pianists might be the luckiest of all musicians, spoiled by a diet of solo repertoire spanning six centuries, piano concerti, chamber music for any combination of instruments, as well as song. Playing any of these genres hones and expands one’s understanding of the others.
When I first began taking “serious” piano lessons, I played a lot of the rather mediocre pieces routinely assigned to young children: Clementi’s Sonatinas; reams of notes spewed out by Czerny (a student of Beethoven). These are a sort of proto-music, like implements in a play-kitchen, blunted and dulled so that children are prevented from causing harm to real works of art. Some composers have even poked fun at the inevitably mechanical tendencies of pianists-in-training, to wonderful effect. In one sonata, Beethoven teases those learners who are trying and failing to play both hands together, the right hand always landing a moment before the left. Pianists limping studiously through scales are lumped in with the other animals in Saint-Saëns’s Carnival. Debussy corrupts “Monsieur” Czerny’s torturous exercises in his Étude No.1 “pour les cinq doigts” (“for the five fingers”): the right hand repeats over and over a grinding ascending and descending sequence, while the left hand peppers dissonances into the texture, throwing a painfully relatable tantrum to disrupt this monotony.
Looking through my notebooks from these early lessons, practising mostly prioritised the workings of the instrument over particular discussion of the makeup of music, such as phrasing, form or harmony. On some pages, the comments are purely anatomical, with detailed explanations of the roles of the shoulder, upper arm, elbow joint, wrist, as well as how to produce a beautiful, rounded sound, and how to distribute weight evenly from one finger to another. Ideally, a pianist should have a hand like a club, with four fingers of equal length. The fingers should be slender enough to squeeze between the black keys—a position essential for so many pieces by Ravel, for example—but with the pleasing weightiness of a cat’s paw, able to produce a relaxed, singing sound without overly pressing the keys.
My own hand is smaller than I’d prefer, though flexible and stretchy, and I remind myself that Chopin also had tiny hands. I have an uncooperatively short fifth finger and have quite often used two or three fingers on one note, the side of my hand, or even occasionally a fist, to gain more surface area and produce a richer sound.
This is one of the more deeply personal aspects of practising: understanding how one’s particular physique moulds itself to the instrument, a process which has, for me, evolved over the years. The entire body is involved in playing the piano and is affected by everything from the height and distance of the piano stool to the way the feet use the pedals. These elements should all combine to enable an uninhibited flow of imagination to the fingertips, and a lot of musicians consider stretching exercises or yoga to be part of their musical preparations. But, quite often, the body imposes itself superfluously. Once, when I was fighting through a passage of leaping chords, my teacher interrupted me, imitating the flailing of a tree in the wind: “You make so many movements that you have no time left to play the notes!”
I harbour some guilt about not maintaining a regular, healthy warm-up routine
Nowadays, my different strands of practising have all intermingled. It seems as though the music I am playing guides me, by itself, to the work it requires, and even to the way I should shape my hand, which varies so much according to the composer. Even when I am doing certain kinds of “housekeeping” (careful memorisation, slow practice of each hand separately), I try to remain alert to the meaning of the piece and open to its questions. I harbour some guilt about not maintaining a regular, healthy warm-up routine—I might begin, impatiently, in the middle of a piece—but I do look for other ways to re-introduce my hand to my ear at the start of each day. Deliberately exploring the contours of the running passages and broken chords in a Mozart concerto, for example, awakens my imagination and reveals far more about the expressive qualities of each harmony than a battery of simple scales ever could.
Living with the music in the subconscious; singing themes to oneself while walking around; seeing parallels in books, films, landscapes, even daily life; daydreaming… all this is also part of truly absorbing a piece. The Czech composer Leoš Janáček always carried a notebook, notating the musical cadences of ordinary people’s speech—in no way is music confined to the practice studio or concert hall. When I sit down on the stage, it is these potent images that leap to the front of my mind, not the minutiae of the many hours spent experimenting with the voicings of different chords or the phrase structure of a melody.
I also know that our personal lives and our character have a way of bursting into our playing, with seemingly unrelated problems threatening to provoke anxiety and fear on stage. Equally, we can completely embody miraculous joy and absolute peace in music while it eludes us in life. Practising is as much a process of honestly dissecting and strengthening the spirit, heart and mind as it is of training the hands.
People often tell me, with some sympathy, that the life of a pianist seems solitary. It is true that taking on responsibility for a solo work is a singularly intense and demanding pledge to make, and that sitting by oneself on stage during a wayward concert is a pretty lonely place to be. But, perhaps sentimentally, it also inspires a feeling of kinship. With all my fellow musicians today who are leading this slightly eccentric way of life. But also with the unbroken line of players, going back through the decades, who committed their lives to these great pieces—and with those who will hopefully continue the tradition in future.
As I practise at home, I like to look at the picture of William Byrd that sits beside my piano. It reminds me that this lifelong contact with great masterpieces is invigorating, consoling and profoundly fulfilling.
