Penelope Roskell – Pianodao

Essential Piano Technique: Levels 2-3

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Penelope Roskell’s Essential Piano Technique series has already established itself as a benchmark resource for introducing healthy piano techniques in an imaginative and musical way.

The first three books appeared in 2023. Primer A, Primer B, and Level 1 publications take the beginner up to around Grade 1 in the UK, and in my review here I concluded,

“I cannot overstate how highly I recommend these three volumes. Beautifully presented, but modestly priced, they establish a new benchmark for teaching children the foundations for a healthy piano technique.”

With the latest two additions to the growing series, Roskell provides a similarly useful and significant resource for players progressing through Late Elementary to Intermediate level, Grades 1-4.

In this review, I will look at these Level 2 and Level 3 books in turn, and consider what part they might play in piano lessons and the development of learners…

Penelope Roskell • Essential Piano Technique

Educational Resources

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Few aspects of piano playing seem to divide opinion on forums as much as healthy technique: what it is, how, and when to teach it. Happily, anyone who is looking for clear, authoritative answers to these questions can find them aplenty in the milestone (and mammoth) book The Complete Pianist, which I reviewed here when it appeared in 2020.

The author of that award-winning book is the concert pianist and teacher Penelope Roskell, a world-leader in the field of injury-free piano playing, and piano adviser to the British Association for Performing Arts Medicine.

Having so plainly and comprehensively shown us what an essential, healthy piano technique looks like in her previous book, Roskell is now back with an attractively presented series of three books aimed at younger beginners and their teachers. Her new Essential Piano Technique books are certainly unlike any previous children’s piano series I have encountered…

The Complete Pianist

The Pianodao Bookshelf

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Penelope Roskell’s The Complete Pianist is the most monumental publication I have yet to receive for review. With 560 large and densely formatted pages, 250 newly-devised exercises and more than 300 supporting online videos, I can well believe that it’s also the most comprehensive book ever written on piano playing, as well as being among the most superbly presented.

Striking among the claims made for the book, we are told that Roskell’s approach is based not only on a lifetime’s experience of teaching and performing, but also on “ground-breaking research into healthy piano playing” …

The Complete Pianist thus offers the reader an…

“… innovative approach to piano technique based on the use of natural, ergonomic movement which achieves a rich range of sounds, allows greater artistic freedom, and helps to prevent injury.”

Intrigued? I bet! So let’s take a closer look…