25 July 2025
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Playing real music in your first lesson? IT CAN HAPPEN WITH HEY PRESTO! Pianist, teacher, and composer Marcel Zidani speaks with Warwick Thompson about Hey Presto! This is his new piano method for adult learners and older children. Zidani shares how his own piano challenges and recovery have shaped his goal. He wants to create healthy piano lessons for everyone.
The pandemic lockdown was appalling for just about everyone, but performing musicians suffered a particularly disheartening blow beside the obvious lack of professional gatherings. Some lost their mojo for a long time, if not entirely.
‘I lost all my performing work, and I was tearing my hair out,’ says British pianist Marcel Zidani. ‘In fact, I couldn’t see a reason to play any more at all. I didn’t touch the piano for three years. I was in a kind of shell-shock.’
But this wasn’t the first setback Zidani had faced in his musical journey. In his late teens, he suffered from severe Repetitive Strain Injury, which limited his practice to a mere five minutes a day. And this long term injury was all just before his auditions to study at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Great timing, eh?
Despite the challenge, his clear talent playing the piano got him a spot. While there, he slowly overcame his muscle issues. He received help from a kind professor named Mark Racz. Years later, during lockdown, it was this same unshakeable spirit which helped him turn his setbacks into opportunities.
This was when he transformed his brilliantly innovative beginners’ book Hey Presto! into an equally successful online course: adultpianobeginners.com.
In Hey Presto! Marcel emphasises the importance of good wrist position and arm weight from the start. This helps prevent strain later.
He also encourages learning musicality, like legato and phrasing, early on. Practicing with the pedal is important too. And it all comes with original compositions of engaging simplicity.
If you are an adult beginner (11+) or returning to learning, you need a high quality piano teacher. This teacher understands the challenges, doubts, and fears that can hold you back. You have found the right person.
SOMETHING A LITTLE DIFFERENT
When we chat on Zoom, I ask Marcel where he got his inspiration from. ‘Teaching in my twenties and thirties, I saw a pattern repeated again and again.
Students aged around 11 to 14 would often lose motivation quickly. Especially if they weren’t building a sense of musicality and confidence. This meant they would be more likely to abandon the piano altogether.
Children’s beginners’ method books weren’t helping them: they tend to hover round middle C for pages and pages. But then there were other adult-aimed books which expected too much too soon, for example, using five right-hand notes in the first lesson. So I wanted to do something a little different, and find a middle way.’
As a professional composer, he was well positioned to create music which would be satisfying from the get-go, and offer immediate musical enjoyment. Marcel was particularly concerned to introduce the pedal as early as possible, as this is often neglected in other early courses. From his own early injuries, he knew how easily bad technique could derail a student too. And so good physical health, and early musicality, formed the core of Hey Presto!
The course covers a wide variety of repertoire, including classical, folk, jazz, blues, minimalist and easy listening. (Marcel is happy to admit that one of his early childhood influences, among Beethoven and Liszt and Chopin, was the French easy-listening supremo Richard Clayderman.)
The book – available as a hardback – has been a terrific success, with plenty of five-star reviews on Amazon.
‘My daughter was about to give up, but I bought this for her. Within a few lessons, you can hear the positive results, and it has restored her confidence,’ says one user.
‘I found most books quite childish, but this is great for adult learners. When I got to the beautiful piece Endless Journey after a few months, I really felt the equivalent of a concert pianist!’ says another.
It was during Marcel’s dark night of the soul during lockdown, that he came up with the idea of creating an online course – which included plenty of videos and opportunities for interaction – based on his book.
He instinctively felt it would help his own musical recovery, as much as offer a lifeline to others. ‘I saw some online courses with individual tutorials, or videos explaining a few chords, but nothing comprehensive. And my book is completely comprehensive, starting at the very beginning, so I knew it could be an excellent beginners’ guide online too. I invested in a good camera, and good equipment and started it off.’
Once people sign up at adultpianobeginners.com, they can start to go through the piano lessons themselves at their own pace, on any device. They receive a free copy of the book after lesson 5.
‘People can also email me their queries, or send me videos, whenever they want. And then all the participants get together online every three or four weeks, and we go through anything they need. Some people simply want to watch, rather than ask questions – and that’s completely alright.’
MORE TO COME
The course is growing from strength to strength. There are more than 43,000 Facebook community members now, and about 4,000 email subscribers. They also support for preparing for Grades 1-3 if that is the student’s goal.
Marcel has another book, Away from the Grade, which continues where Hey Presto! finishes. It includes ten more of his compositions, with essential information about fingering, phrasing, pedalling and musical flow for both student and teacher. ‘It moves away from being a method book into the realm of educational repertoire,’ he says.
The books and the online resources have been as beneficial for Marcel as much as for his students.
As well as enjoying all the opportunities of teaching, he now performs again and was recently the soloist in Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain – a supremely challenging work – with the Cheltenham Philharmonic.
‘Lockdown took away the rhythm of performance that I’d relied upon for decades – but it also forced me to explore new avenues to share music and teach,’ he says. ‘In some ways, that disruption has helped me build something even more far-reaching. As life resumes its flow, I’m just grateful to be back at the keyboard, and looking forward to what comes next.’
And so, I expect, are his fortunate students.