Week 2: Your First Check-in
You’ve chosen your Liszt piece. Now the adventure really begins.
This week is all about getting inside the music without worrying about perfection yet. Liszt’s music can feel grand, poetic, dramatic, intimate, or completely overwhelming, sometimes all within the same page.
For this week, we’d love for you to share:
- Early practice clips
- First impressions of your piece
- Passages you’re struggling with
- Musical moments you already love
- Questions or discoveries from practice
- How Liszt feels under your hands so far
A few ideas to focus on this week:
- Finding a comfortable starting tempo
- Practicing smaller sections instead of full run-throughs
- Looking for patterns in the texture
- Identifying one or two “problem spots”
- Finding the main melody inside thick textures
Whether you’re working on a Consolation, a transcription, a Hungarian Rhapsody, a piece from Years of Pilgrimage, or a short excerpt from a larger work, we’re excited to hear your first steps into Liszt’s world.
Looking forward to seeing what everyone is discovering this week!
119 replies
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I am working on Liszt’s transcription of Frühlingsglaube by Schubert. Here is a first recording of the beginning. It is really all about making the piano sing. A lot of voicing I have to work on: Upper right hand, upper left hand, sometimes split up between both hands. This part is still very close to the original Schubert song. The real work is still to come 😂🎹😂
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Hi everyone, late getting to this but here is my week 2 update. Key focus has been balance and tone for the first phase - and trying to get a tempo that works for this piece.
Recorded in an unusually warm Dublin, I think this piece definitely has spring or summer credentials - perhaps set in that time of year during Liszt's Swiss "pilgrimage"! ☀️🏞️
https://youtu.be/ris1dfnjrBA?is=ma_xNLUUPlq-ingW
Derek
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With huge regret, I need to withdraw from the Lisztomaniac challenge this summer. I’ve been diagnosed with cervical osteoarthritis, which has been affecting me more and more over the past five months. I don’t have pain when I play the piano, which is good—but I’m just too tired. The lack of sleep caused by the pain is wearing me down.
So I don’t practice as much as I used to, and I’m therefore not really progressing anymore. I feel I just need to reduce my piano-related goals to a minimum. I’ll still follow your updates so I can stay connected to the piano activities.
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I’ve decided that I’m not going to participate by playing in this challenge (I will listen, watch, cheer on!). Trying to do so put me over my manageable stress level! Since I’m the (volunteer) cantor for our church and we have no choir, I’ve been spending many hours each week preparing music for the weekend. Adding the Liszt to the mix was just too much. Thurmond and I are working on Sancte Caecilia together, though, because learning a vocal piece is much more in my wheelhouse, especially since it’s in Latin. .