A Private Lesson with Flavio Cucchi

I had the opportunity to arrange a private lesson with Flavio Cucchi, an Italian guitarist professor, when he came here for a concert.
I learn quite a lot from this lesson.

I waited for him as it was the lunch time.
When he arrived finally, he was very polite and nice.
He asked what guitar I was using, and was very surprised that I made the guitar myself.
He asked to try and the guitar and test the various tone colours of the guitar.
He just said it's very nice.
I guess it did live to his expectations.

Then we started the lesson.
I played to him the Suite in A minor by Manuel Maria Ponce.
When I did the prelude then the first thing he commented was the tempo.
What I thought was acceptable was really not acceptable.
The prelude is divided into 3 sections, a freely intro, a 2nd more a tempo section which consists of broken chords progression and a conclusion.
I did the first section very freely and he said it's wasn't really supposed to be that free.
Even freedom has a structure to it that timing / tempo still need to be kept.
That's really penny for thought.
But I did what he asked me too and it did really sounded much better.

Anyway I had a weakness that is being unable to read off the score.
I did memorise the entire suite and never look at the score since.
So I discover that I need to be able to do both, memorised and yet being able to read the score at the same time.
We worked out the entire prelude in terms of dynamics and colors.

For the 2nd movement, he advise me to divide the score into phrases.
I never realise the phrase was such before until he pointed out.
It was very enlightening.

For the 3rd movement, again was the rhythm problem.
He said I was playing too freely and I never realised it until I did counting.
Again the piece sounded much better.

We only began the 4th movement when time was up...
Sigh well but I did learn a lot from the 1 hour session.
Well it's not something I didn't know before but more of reminder of something I had overlooked.

Well with that analysis of score breaking up into phrases, I apply it to my learning of new scores and discover that it really helps.