Category: Piano Video Tutorials & Articles by Jenny Macmillan

Macmillan, Jenny: A comparison of Suzuki piano recordings

New recordings of the Suzuki piano repertoire have been made by Seizo Azuma, co-chair of the ISA piano committee and a professor of piano at Tokyo University. When his recordings of Books 1, 2 and 3 came out in 2008, I was filled with enthusiasm.

At last, we had recordings that teachers and pupils need and deserve. They addressed virtually all the reservations I expressed about available recordings in my article of 1999: Three recordings of Suzuki piano repertoire books 1 and 2: a comparison.

The final sentence in that article was: ‘There seems to me clear scope for a new recording which would need to be technically accurate and musically sensitive to inspire Suzuki pupils’. I feel this has now been achieved. I hope that those who are used to the recordings by Haruko Kataoka (which I find aggressive at times), Valerie Lloyd-Watts (which I find insipid), or William Aide (in which some pieces are a little fast) will enjoy this new recording.

Jenny Macmillan has a thriving teaching practice in Cambridge and is an ESA piano teacher trainer. Her own three children all learned piano by the Suzuki approach.

Jenny has written extensively about the Suzuki approach and her articles feature on her website: http://www.jennymacmillan.co.uk/