The first time I sat down at the piano after years away, I was expecting one of two things: either my hands would remember more than I thought, or nothing would come back…

Grade 8 is the goalpost most piano learners have in their heads. It’s the one that gets mentioned when people ask how far you’ve got, the one that marks the line between “learning…

There’s a specific kind of magic to sitting down at the piano and playing something you recognise from a film. It bypasses all the usual questions about whether you’re playing it well enough…

When I first started playing piano seriously as an adult, I had no idea what grade I was. I’d done a Grade 1 exam as a child, forgotten approximately everything, and started again…

I finished learning the Mozart Allegro from K. 282 a while back and I remember the specific feeling of getting to the end of a clean run-through and thinking: right, I want to…

The first time I played Clair de Lune, it was a simplified version. One of those arrangements that keeps the melody intact and strips out most of the complexity, so you get the…

Träumerei was the piece that got me into Schumann properly. I’d heard it loads of times before I ever tried to play it — it’s one of those pieces that turns up everywhere,…

For a long time, Beethoven felt like a mountain I wasn’t allowed to climb. Not because of anything anyone said to me — just because every time his name came up, it was…

For ages, I thought Chopin was for other people. You know the ones — people who started piano at four, worked through all their grades, went to proper music school. Not adult learners…

You’ve mastered Für Elise, but Moonlight Sonata still feels completely out of reach. Welcome to the intermediate piano zone, where the difference between early and late stages is massive. Most piano teachers use…