Recommended Sheet Music, The First Piano Recital: Preparing Your Beginners For A Performance

Award-winning author Melanie Spanswick has written and edited an array of piano books for the international market to critical acclaim. With over twenty-eight publications to her name, her three-book piano course Play it again: Piano has become an international best-selling series. Her recent publication, the two-book series First Repertoire for Little Pianists, provides a treasure trove of meticulously graded music, bursting with imagination and inventiveness. With this topic in mind, Melanie has kindly created a selection of tips and tricks to help teachers prepare beginner pianists for their first recitals.  

Melanie Spanswick: The First Piano Recital

"We all remember our first performance. It’s a feeling one never forgets. For me, it was a Christmas concert at my piano teacher’s house. She lived in, what I considered at the time, a mansion complete with a designated performance space featuring large sash windows which overlooked a wide river. The ‘concert room’ housed a stage and two back-to-back ancient grand pianos - a Steinway and a Bechstein: there was probably sufficient space in the ‘concert’ room to seat at least fifty or sixty audience members. A scary prospect.

However, I was an ‘old’ beginner at the age of ten, and perhaps rather surprisingly, I was so enthusiastic that I asked to play multiple times showcasing all my new pieces and - the best bit - I received a couple of giant Dairy Milk chocolate bars for my efforts! Real nerves often don’t ‘set-in’ until one is much older and most agree that the only way to become accustomed to the unnerving feeling often suffered before a performance, is to do it on a regular basis, which is why a termly student concert is such a useful event. 

Younger students, and those new to the piano, can be shy and hesitant even during a lesson let alone in a concert situation, but there are a few steps which can be implemented in order to get them ready for the big day to help their first public performance become both a successful and a memorable occasion.

1. Allow plenty of time. It usually takes a good few weeks to prepare concert repertoire and therefore give students time to learn their piece or pieces thoroughly.

2. Pick repertoire carefully. Encourage students to prepare two or three pieces which are preferably below their current level. Ensure that students really enjoy playing these pieces and aim for at least one to be a duet, so that you, the teacher, can play alongside them. A young student will be greatly comforted by the presence of a teacher sitting next to them, establishing the tempo of a piece as well as helping to keep them going if nerves set in. First Repertoire For Little Pianists provides all the music you need in this respect because many of the little pieces in both books (Book 1 is for beginners and Book 2, for late beginners) are in a ‘teacher and student’ duet format, and the music is tuneful and fun to play.

3. Get parents involved. My younger student’s parents attend every lesson, they take notes and promise to help with weekly practice sessions. Without them, young children will generally forget what has been said in the lesson and will not complete the necessary practice.

4. Routine is key. Encourage students to establish a practice routine every day. Aim to keep your student’s practice focused, ensuring full concentration; in order to do this it’s crucial to show them (and their parents) exactly ‘how to practice’.

5. Very slow practice can eliminate hesitations. Beginners can have issues with hesitation. To nip this in the bud, set a very slow speed for each piece, allowing them to play whilst counting out loud, keeping a firm pulse; aim for about a third of the intended tempo and ask them to play right through the piece. A couple of weeks of such practice should help; ask parents to count, too, and to keep the child’s pace slow, so that they have enough time and space to think through each new hand position and finger change.

6. Imagination. Once the piece can be played securely up to speed, now is the time to trigger the student’s imagination: Why do they like their piece? What does it remind them of? Can they draw pictures of what they feel their piece is about? Hopefully, this will engage their creative side. First Repertoire For Little Pianists is packed with fun games, exercises and cute drawings all intended to spark a young beginner’s imagination.

7. Now it’s time for ‘Performance Practice’. Once their selected piece or pieces are up to speed and can be played fairly accurately from beginning to end, ask students to play them through every day during their practice session. Parents can help by listening attentively and by assembling a few relatives or friends to listen too.

8. Attention to detail. A couple of weeks before the event it’s time to discuss little ‘concert’ details such as how and when to bow, what to do if a mistake is made, how to approach the stage and when to begin, so that there are no ‘surprises’ on the day.

9. The ‘mock’ performance. At the final lesson before the concert, ask your student to run through the whole process, from walking on the stage, to bowing before and after, sitting down on the stool (it’s advisable to adjust the stool for them), preparing to play the first notes (can they count a bar in before they start?), to walking off the stage at the end.

10. The Big Day. Keep students calm and try to be positive, upbeat, and above all, irrespective of what happens, to be encouraging – this should be an exciting event. And for the ultimate encouragement, don’t forget the chocolate!

I’ve found that if a performance is dealt with in a ‘matter of fact’ manner, students tend to think of them as a normal part of piano study, which will hopefully bode well for future endeavours."

Melanie Spanswick

First Repertoire for Little Pianists

With thanks to Melanie Spanswick for the content of this article.