What's the most challenging piece you've ever learned and how did you tackle it?

I've somehow managed to learn and perform some pretty heavy-duty pieces, from the Hammerklavier Sonata to Alkan's Grande Sonate and numerous etudes, as well as Godowsky-Chopin etudes, Ligeti etudes, and Liszt's Transcendental etudes.

But the hardest one for me to learn wasn't especially technically difficult; it was rhythmically extremely complex: Nimrod Borenstein, whose music has been championed by Vladimir Ashkenazi for instance, was kind enough to write an etude for me. It's a study in polyrhythms that change bar by bar, and quite unlike Ligeti's already incredibly complex polyrhythms (Désordre, Automne à Varsovie) in which there is at least a common denominator, almost none of the rhythms actually line up. It involves multiple polyrhythms in each hand simultaneously, for instance counting odd groups of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and/or 7 all at once, such as sextuplets with 2+3 16th note pattern in 3/4 in the right hand against quintuplets with 3+2 16ths in the left.

Joe Crabtree's app Polynome helped me to work out some polyrhythms that I don't think it's possible to count otherwise, unless somebody out there has a built-in atomic clock.

Like all complex music, the task is to make it sound logical and natural, so if I did my job it should hopefully just sound musical. I nicknamed it the "Brain Damage Etude"! It's really a beautiful piece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKApII2r1Gs

In the "had to learn" category, I was taking various classes at the Longy School in Cambridge, MA. One the professors mentioned to me that there was a juried recital scheduled for some months later and she suggested that a young flutist, who was a student at Longy, and I would be a good match. She further suggested that we do the Prokofiev Flute Sonata. Asked if I was willing, I said "yes". Then I looked at the score. Wrong order :-)

But I was committed. As an amateur pianist with a busy life in other areas, I don't think I've ever worked as hard or well on learning a piece as I did with the Prokofiev. And to my surprise, diligent practice really works! Difficulties that I didn't think I could overcome eventually disappeared. With excellent coaching from the late Yves Chardon (a former cellist in the Boston Symphony and assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra) and the utterly amazing John Heiss of the New England Conservatory, we passed the audition by the jury and played the concert. I have a recording of the performance. It's pretty much note-perfect, despite my being nervous about certain passages, such as the very end of the Scherzo.

A lesson to me was not to underestimate the power of good, hard work. The other lesson was that the antidote for stage fright, which we all experience to some degree or another, is preparation.

An interesting coda: a year or so after the recital, the flutist and I got together to play the Prokofiev again for old times' sake. I did not look at the piece before this session, assuming I knew it so well that further practice was not necessary. Wrong! My playing was very far from note-perfect and pretty awful. Practice!

Sometimes it’s all about ingoing expectations. The most daunting experience is when pieces don’t SOUND terribly hard but are actually quite hard to learn or master. The opposite is the best case scenario — pieces that sound hard but are relatively easy to learn! Good ROI on time spent! 

I've been working on the Pathétique Sonata by Beethoven for years now. I thought the first movement was the most difficult,  but it's actually the 3rd movement that's the real bear. I've tried to balance my desire to perfect it with learning other pieces as well.

My inspiration for focusing on one work and for returning to the piano was a book by Alan Rusbridger called "Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible" where he commits to learning Chopin's Ballade No. 1. For those who don't know, Rusbridger was the Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian during the whole Eric Snowden affair. A bit of a time suck for him LOL.

Chopin Ballade #4 is pretty tough. I'd have to say it tackled me. I went at it for a couple of years, then broke off into other things, one of which is in a following paragraph here! Back at it now, I've improved quite a bit, in part because I'm taking much smaller bites and really working short passages to get them feeling easier, more relaxed, more controlled. But not just that - also refusing to play just to defeat the piece, but rather to wring music out of it. I'm a bit shocked at how much that has helped, both for the enjoyment of my neighbors (!) but also as a great metric to how the technical is going. If it sounds smooth and musical, evidence that the technical is coming along. If it sounds like a battle, it is one! So, I'm trying to make peace with it now. Of course, the coda is still a thing. But a much more musical thing than it was.

So… Chopin Ballade too hard, maybe I'll take it easy and do Prokofiev 8th Sonata. That is also a multi-year project, but with some work left to do in the last page of both the first and third movements, it's really coming along. Same approach - just stopping myself from playing it as if I'm trying to beat it down, and instead working small sections and making it as musical as I can.

There are parts of that Prokofiev that sound like a battle anyway… not much I can do about the neighbors. Bars 133 till about 190… not neighborly but really fun to get it right. And then the rat race at the end of the movement.

I think I'm crazy to try it. But no matter. The 3rd movement is such a riot to play it's worth the pain! Also jaw-dropping to watch someone play it.

Age of this topic - This whole post of mine was approximately true 2 years ago. What's 2 years anyway? Meanwhile, I really enjoyed hearing that Borenstein. Very nice!