It's another late night practice session, but this one went much better than yesterday's. I'm feeling confident that with a lot of work tomorrow I can put this first variation behind me and move on to the new stuff! I'm sure you, the listener, are looking forward to that too!
By the way, I like to drink tea while I play and this is where I put the shoutout to Harlan & Megan for some delicious evening herbal tea. I would thank them for the peppermint bark too, but I don't want anyone to know I have it...
One topic of focused work today: keeping hands from interfering with each other while crossing over. This piece was written for a harpsichord with *two* keyboards on it; one for each hand. That makes "crossing" hands trivial. But when you have just one register, as on a modern piano, it can be much trickier when the right hand needs to play notes below where the left hand is working. The solution here is to arch my right hand significantly, poking at the notes with an outstretched finger, and to play those note far toward the back of the key.
I'm of two minds stylistically here. Near the end of the piece, there's a place where the left hand is playing 16th note runs while the right hand is playing 8th note arpeggios; as I mentioned previously I've been trying to contrast those parts, playing the fast part smoothly and the slow part less so. Well, like I said near the end that's happening, and then the hands switch - now the right hand has the runs and the left has the arpeggios, and I just feel this need to play *both* hands smoothly there. I can't decide if that's good or not. It won't be super noticeable in the recording because I made a mistake and started playing the left hand an octave lower than it's supposed to be, so I had to restart there. But if you listen closely you should hear it, and I would welcome your comments on it.
OK, here is a pretty good, at-tempo recording of Variation 1:
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