In this lesson, American pianist Leann Osterkamp breaks down the technical and musical obstacles of Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu, and devises practice strategies to help you overcome them. Rather than walking through the piece from beginning to end, she selects passages that best represent a certain kind of obstacle and uses them as models applicable to related passages.

Osterkamp first focuses on fingering and compares finding the best fingering to solving a crossword puzzle. She then applies this method to a tricky run in the right hand and shows how finding the right fingering solution can decrease its difficulty substantially. Secondly, she targets a pervasive polyrhythm in the piece where the right hand plays four notes against the left hand's three. She demonstrates how polyrhythms can also be determined precisely by visualizing where the notes of each rhythm fall, and using this spatial representation of the rhythm as a guide for executing them at the keyboard.

To help you develop a natural feeling of rubato, Osterkamp focuses on the lyrical middle section. To do that, Osterkamp recommends you try putting words to the melody and singing it, keeping track of the natural variation in stress and duration in your voice. She encourages you to develop a conscious stylistic approach to Chopin, choosing between different valid approaches.

Finally, Osterkamp focuses on applying pedal, likening the process of trying out extremes (too wet or too dry) to determining just the right prescription at the eye doctor.

At first glance, classical piano scores can feel like a barrier to playing the beautiful music they're supposed to represent. How are we to decode these complex hieroglyphics and turn them into flowing melodies and harmonies? In this lesson, Steinway Artist Leann Osterkamp helps you confront a score for the first time, none other than Beethoven's iconic Klavierstücke, Für Elise. Drawing your attention to the many symbols that adorn each page, Osterkamp helps you decipher the score and begin mapping it onto the keyboard. The tools you take away from this lesson will help equip you to continue exploring the scores of your favorite pieces.

Texture is a word we often associate with touch, as in the softness of a cloth or the roughness of gravel, yet pianists are often heard referring to the texture of music. In this lesson, Steinway Artist Leann Osterkamp digs into this metaphor, focusing on two fundamental aspects of piano playing – dynamics and articulation – and showing how to control these dimensions at the keyboard to create a variety of textures in two popular works, Mozart's Sonata in C major, K. 545 and Debussy' Clair de lune.

Music has long been likened to language, given that both consist of organized sound patterns. Although we can't describe things literally using abstract tones, music can sound meaningful in the way a performer articulates phrases. In this lesson, Steinway Artist Leann Osterkamp addresses the question of how to create phrases at the piano by considering speech and song. Through these linguistic analogies, she shows how to process and shape the complex phrases units of Brahms's beloved Intermezzo, Op. 118 No. 2.

While pianists are most often preoccupied with their hands, it is their feet that often play a decisive role in how a piece of music sounds. In this lesson, Steinway Artist Leann Osterkamp introduces you to the right, left, and middle pedals of a concert grand piano, uncovering the mechanism each triggers inside the instrument and showing how it contributes to different musical effects. Using a range of examples, from Pachelbel's Canon to a Chopin Nocturnes to Schumann's Arabeske, Osterkamp begins with the basic functions of the pedal before revealing its many subtle applications you can use to bring nuance and color to your playing.

Trills and ornaments are a nuisance for many developing pianists. Just when you've managed to wrap your hands around the notes of a piece, the composer asks you to add embellishments that risk disrupting the flow of your performance. In this lesson, Steinway Artist Leann Osterkamp clarifies the purpose of ornaments in music-making and offers a straightforward guide to realizing them elegantly at the keyboard. Using two great masters of ornamentation as case studies – Mozart and Chopin – Osterkamp shows how to make sense of trills, turns, mordents, and more to add style and verve to the music.

A perennial source of frustration for developing pianists comes in the form of polyrhythm. It requires enough concentration to execute a single rhythm with precision at the keyboard, let alone to deliver more than one competing rhythm at the same time with two hands. In this lesson, Steinway Artist Leann Osterkamp shows you why you shouldn't fear polyrhythms. Using case studies from Chopin, Brahms, and Debussy, she offers practical pointers to developing hand independence and mental focus that will allow you to play different kinds of polyrhythms with ease.

Memory (Chopin, Rachmaninoff)

Just when you thought you've mastered a piece of music, suddenly the score is taken away from the music desk and you feel lost in the woods. It is no wonder that the task of memorizing music has caused even the most accomplished pianists to feel debilitating anxiety when they walk on stage. In this lesson, Steinway Artist Leann Osterkamp shows how to train your mental and physical memory to work in tandem to help internalize pieces in your mind and body, so you may freely perform them without the aid of the score. Using examples from Chopin and Rachmaninoff, Osterkamp reveals how memorization is the natural result of a process of analyzing musical form, identifying melodic and harmonic relationships, and matching musical patterns with physical shapes at the keyboard.