I am about to take Grade 7 piano and find aurals rather challenging.

I would welcome tips on how to recognise the chords after naming the cadence - I do not find it at all easy to hear base notes so any other suggestions will be most welcome.

The best way to get to grips with this is to play the chords over and over yourself, in a variety of keys so that you get to know how they sound. If you are correctly naming the cadences, you already know what at least two of the chords are.

I found the aural tests, particularly the cadence test, hard.For my grade 8 clarinet, I had a book (called Aural Time) which had lots of examples written down and on a CD, so you can listen and follow along. My teacher lent me another book the weekend before the exam (called something like Improve your Aural) which was extremely useful because it had a CD and exercises which built up each test until it had the whole thing together. These were both very useful, particularly because I could sing along with the cadences.

Just listen to lots of examples, it certainly helped me. I went to sleep the night before my exam singing different cadences!

We were told a way of recognising a perfect or plagal cadence by singing the root note of chord I, and if that note fits in with the chord before the last, then it's chord IV, which suggests Plagal, and if it doesn't, then it's more likely Perfect. Eg. We're in C major, so you keep the C in your head. If it's a plagal cadence, the C would fit in with the chord, as C is in the F major arpeggio. If it's a perfect cadence, the C is going to sound odd because it doesn't belong to the G major arpeggio.

Hope this helps, I haven't explained very clearly!

Yes I think that makes sense, but I'm not sure whether plagal cadences are required for grade 7 or only for grade 8. Interesting way of thinking about it though, I'd never thought of it like that, but I suppose it might work!

This sort of thing can seem like a good way of coping with this if you've had to learn it all in a short space of time but I found that in the exam the examples appear to go sp quickly that you don't have time to begin to use it.
Maybe my brain is a bit slow moving though.

In addition to listening for the bass etc

Did it feel like it was going to end and then surprise you - interrupted - a glorious example towards the end of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto slow mvmt

Ask yourself if the piece could end at that point - has it returned 'home' - if not, probably 'imperfect'

sight read lots of classical (mozart, haydn) and pre-classical and work out by ear or analysis the cadences at the end of each phrase (eg. play through classics to moderns vol 1)

improvise 2 bars of a 5 finger tune ending on supertonic (imperfect), then another 2 bars to return to tonic (perfect) just to hear the implied harmony

I think the more examples of each that you can play/listen to knowing in advance what cadence it is (to reduce the pressure one can put oneself under), the easier it will become