Keith Jarrett (the renowned jazz virtuoso) has also recorded a critically acclaimed version of the Shostakovich P & F. Definitely worth look out for (as are his other improvised concerts - the man's a genius).

Edward

It shows in the film Shine (1996) the David Helfgott also learnt to play it blindfolded.
I have just started learning the Rach 3 (page 16 atm), and it is immensly difficult. But there are probably qually as hard pieces out there, although no-one will ever know which piece is the hardest. Rachmaninoff's 3rd piano concerto is definitly the most beautiful piece I've ever heard, that's the only reason I'm learning it! (It will take me months and months for me to learn it! But will love nearly every minute of it)

I shold think that Rachmaninov's Prelude C sharp minor is rather difficult, especially with small hands"

1. If you think Flight of the Bumble Bee, the Hungarian rhapsodies, Moonlight Sonata 3rd movement, Bach's Preludes and Fugues, or even (terrifying as some of their compositions are) anything by Liszt, Rachmaninoff or Prokofiev is the height of pianistic difficulty then you need to broaden your horizons a bit.

2. As I improve as a pianist "difficult" pieces become easier and "easy" pieces become more difficult.

3. However the likes of Opus Clavicembalisticum remain impossible and probably always will.

1. I agree. Hungarian Rhapsodies are hard, but no. 2 is fantastic! Love it to bits. Haven't even got close to looking at the bumble bee, hands not nimble enough.

2. Yeah I find that. Probably because I'm more motivated and determined to learn the harder pieces and so take less interest and care in easier pieces!

3. Never heard that before but listened to someone playing it on youtube. Not my kinda thing; sounds like a collection of random notes to my ears. But very difficult.

Well, I was going to say that Rachmaninov's third piano concerto is the most difficult piece I've heard, but this makes it seem rather tame in comparison

Sorry , in my original October post I meant Op87 No 12 , which is in G# minor. Only just realised this.!
Can anybody play it ???

The 1st/3rd movment of the Gershwin piano concerto? (esp. the solo version)

Nonsense. It is difficult (at least for most of us!) but a long, long way from being "the most difficult".

Anyway, who actually cares what the most difficult piano piece is? It can only be a subjective answer at best as everyone has different strengths and weaknesses.
Let's all just get on with playing the piano at whatever level we are

Thats not really true, I think they're pretty good pieces, not just pointless virtuosity.

I would imagine that Etude in A Flat Major Op. 1 No. 2 by Paul De Schlozer is one of the most difficult.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEnfZjqMSy0

La Campanella by Liszt. I have the music for this, and I honestly have no idea where I would start with it. I mean, there are pieces that I can at least see how I'd approach them even if they are too hard for me, but I'm convinced this one is actually physically impossible to play.

La Campanella is extremely difficult, but I believe it only falls under the LRSM standard.
I prefer Valentina Lisitsa's version of La Campanella to Yundi Li's.

Has anyone tried to play 'Islamey' by Balakirev ?

Nancarrow's player piano pieces, if they count. I think that Joanna McGregor has played them. But as someone said, who cares?

I can struggle through it, rather than play it. I have never felt like doing the work to get it into a performable state because I find it rather a boring piece. There are many better things on which to spend that amount of effort. It is a difficult piece, but not so difficult as its reputation. It is certainly a long way from being the zenith of pianistic difficulty. (as are Nancarrow's compositions).

Me too - both her studio version and her live one. She's currently recording (or recently finished) the first two Rachmaninov concerti for Naxos - can't wait!

I really like this piece but my favourite version is by Evgeny Kissin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXq7Slxxr1s...feature=related

Fair enough

Clearly not physically impossible - as your own YouTube link proves

It is actually one of those pieces that looks and sounds more difficult than it is (not that I am denying that it IS difficult). My previous teacher could play it incredibly well, and did so once at a master class, stunning the audience. He himself was more impressed by another participant that played Bach's Fugue No 15 from Book 1 of the WTC, which he rated as a far more difficult piece to play well than the showy "La Campanella".

Anyway, it is definitely NOT the "most difficult" piece. It is not even in the running.

The Prokofiev Piano Concerto no. 2 is said to be fiendishly difficult to play.

Alkan's music looks and sounds incredibly difficult.

Here's a taster

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEk0u6fJByo

Here is a link to the piece which I mentioned earlier; Étude in A Flat played by Eileen Joyce

Etude in A Flat

Background info:
Rachmaninoff played this piece as his warm up excercise every day.
The pianist playing this recording, Eileen Joyce is said to have never played a single wrong note in public.
This étude is considered to be one of the most difficult short piano pieces ever written.

When I was 18, I wrote a piece that had semiquaver octaves, sixths and thirds at a tempo of a crotchet at 200 bpm - that must surely be a contender for the hardest piano piece.

But seriously, this question is just for fun conjecture. There are a great many pieces that I find amazing that any people can play them. But isn't equally impressive when one hears a master taking a 'simple' piece and elevating it to a state of beauty?

At risk of Mad Tom (probably correctly) accusing me of stalking Valentina Lisitsa, here she is playing a simply piece we all know, but making it wholly new:

Für Elise

We all know that Edwardo is in love with the divine Valentina. . Well - given a choice of me or her in a pink Tutu it is no contest. And she also plays piano quite well.

As for those pieces wurlitzer found by "Pauo de Schlozer" ... they are almost certainly by Moszkowski. Moszkowski is another of those unjustly neglected composers who somehow got labelled or pigeonholed (in his case as a composer of "Salon Music") and never recovered.

That's correct. Schlozer was a friend os Moszkowski's and as Schlozer is only known for two works (Op. 1 No. 1 and Op. 1 No. 2) it is suspected that the two pieces which Schlozer published as his own were actually written by Moszkowski, but that he lost the manuscript for them in a card game to Schlozer, who then published them as his own.

Agreed!

I recorded this with Richard Meyrick for a series of CDs I was doing with him and he mentioned at the time that this was the most difficult piece there was for a pianist to play.

Virtually impossible to play through without a mistake.

Have fun.

It is without doubt a very difficult piece (Scarbo is certainly too hard for me to do anything but struggle with it) but MOST difficult? ... not by a long way.


Now that is interesting. Are you a recording engineer, or do you play an instrument professionally? EDIT: Forget that question - I have remembered some of your previous posts.


He is a very fine pianist, and what he has done for the piano and pianists (teaching adults, pianoman, Horowitz transcriptions) is fantastic, but I think he is wrong. Perhaps it was not a carefully considered remark? Does he really think Gaspard is more difficult than some of Sorabji's creations? Maybe you can ask him when you see him again?


Well it is not unique in that

I intend to

I recently saw sheet music for Rachmaninov's third piano concerto piano part. It certainly looked good for a laugh.

I have come across a few people who class Ravel's piano transcription of La Valse as in the same league as Gaspard. I may have said this somewhere before, but I think the most difficult part of that suite is Le Gibet.

I have attempted the Rachmaninoff- it's one of those pieces that you can work on all your life and still only be able to get through half of the first movement before you die.

Sorabji scores just look like someone picked up a burst fountain pen with the intention of composing and had a seizure or something. I'm sure it is playable, the scores just make you run away screaming.

I think in terms of the sheer amount of stamina it requires and concentration and ability to grab and hold an audience for a long period of time I'm going to say the Liszt Sonata. Although ask me again and I'd say something else. There are lots of difficult piano works out there.

I think one of the hardest has to be a couple of the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies (No.2 in Particular). But of course there's the Chopin Etudes, Rach Concerto's etc

This thread runs on and on, and people keep coming up with the same handful of pieces as most difficult - which they are most definitely not - not by a country mile. Anyone that thinks they are has simply not heard or studied enough of the piano repertoire.

Liszt wrote a lot of very difficult to play pieces (B minor sonata, Apres une lecture de Dante etc.) but Hungarian Rhapsody No 2 is not amongst them. In the grand scheme of things it is really not a very difficult piece at all. It just looks it from the way that some pianists exaggerate its physical demands. And Liszt's most difficult pieces are probably not the most diffficult of all.

The difficulty of the Chopin Etudes is not merely playing them - with stubborn hard work they are do-able by any diploma-level pianist - it is playing them well which is difficult - removing those last little rough edges - which explains why some great pianists (e.g. Friedrich Gulda) neither recorded them nor played them in public.

However, the Rachmaninov concertos really are difficult. Number two is hard enough, but number three is moving into the realms of impossible for mere mortals.

But none of these difficult works is remotely close to being the "most difficult" piano piece.

For most pianists Gaspard de la Nuit is tougher than any of them but I can't agree with Wobby that it is the most difficult of all. Nor can I agree with Invidia that Le Gibet is its most difficult part. It might be hard to make convincing music from its sparse texture, but most of us could at least make something of it, whereas our Ondine would limp along at 3/4 speed (if that) and we probably could not even hit most of the notes of Scarbo - at least not in the right order, or at the right time.

There are literally hundreds of pieces that make HR2 seem like a beginner's exercise. Just for starters, a better contender fro most difficult piece would be Alkan's Concerto for Solo Piano (I am not suggesting that it IS the most diffficult - but it is in a different league of difficulty to any of the old chestnuts mentioned above).

The scariest score must surely be Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum. Whether it is the most difficult is a question for very much better pianists than me to decide because for me, above a certain not-very-high level, it all becomes impossible.

I found this book in a second hand shop only a couple of weeks ago, Duet ForThree Hands, beside the photo of the pianist and his Mrs, was an inscription to our dear friends Leslie and Elsa Orrey Love from Cyril and Phyl. Orrey was mentioned in the book, he was a teacher at Goldsmiths college. Only cost £1 too ! i've read about 40 pages so far, but it's really good.

I agree that Gaspard is not the most difficult work. Ondine once you have your fingers around the motif in bars 15/16 and the double thirds it's fine, assuming you tackle this when you are good enough obviously for a grade 5 pianist it would be impossible. I admit when I first started learning it the climax with the polyrhythms terrified me, but there are more difficult aspects of the piece.

Le Gibet, the main reason I said it was the most difficult was because I've heard literally two recordings played at the tempo Ravel indicated. Even at its' premier, Vines did not take Ravel's speed and told him it would bore the audience. To make it all hang together in a convincing way, at the indicated speed, without boring a listener or yourself takes a LOT. Emphasis on boring yourself; I assume that's the real issue Vines had and feared if he got bored of it at the marked tempo then he would lose his audience.

Scarbo, I admit, is an absolute nightmare. My teacher described it as just something some people can play and others cant; listing Chopin 10/1 and Islamey along with it (but there are many others). Basically it just takes a lot of patience to learn this; in my experience you can practise it all day, come back the next and it will all be undone- but if you keep at it, once you make that breakthrough it becomes easier. And to be honest, I think the same can be said of most pieces- for that reason Scarbo is not as impossibly difficult as people make it sound. Just half that =P

Richter thought Scriabins fifth sonata to be the most difficult solo piece for him to play well, I suppose it varies from pianist to pianist. Brahms second piano concerto is thought to be the most physically taxing of the great romantic concertos.

John Lill played both Brahms Piano Concertos in one concert here a few years back.

OMG it is like I have seen a ghost, she is the spitting image of my sister that I lost last year. So uncanny, expressions and everything, only difference is that my sister couldn't play the piano, but her favourite piece was Fur Elise, and I was in the process of learning it especially for her before she died. Unfortunately I never did get to play it to her.

Lisitsa plays Ondine very beautifully, but anything else I've heard from her, particularly Chopin Etudes and Rach 39/6 brings the phrase 'bull in a china shop' to mind. Her Scarbo is 8 minutes of LOOK HOW FAST I CAN PLAY!!!!!!!

Speaking of difficult works, Rach 39/6 would give Scarbo a run for its money if it lasted double the length it does!

I heard him play both in Liverpool too, I think it was his 60th birthday or something..

Oops were off thread now.

I agree that Lisitsa can seem to be all about the speed, but her Chopin Etudes (which, in any case, are studies rather than performance pieces) were recorded a very long time ago, as was Scarbo. I disagree about the Rach 39/6 because, of all the versions I've heard, she brings real menace to the piece. Her most recent recordings (which include the Rach concerti as well as a selection of Beethoven sonatas, some available on YouTube, including a superb reading of the Hammerklavier) offer evidence that she's leaving the showboating behind. But then, as Mad Tom would probably say, I'm biased....

Edward

Can't see myself being shifted away from the Brendel recording I have to be honest but I'll have to hunt that down and have a listen..

Justifiable bias. She is my kind of girl too.

[Then again - on second thoughts - how would my ego cope with a woman that not only plays piano 10x better than me, but could also beat me at chess].

Back to piano playing. Rachmaninoff's own, rather slow rendition of 39/6 is definitive in my opinion, and it would be a really remarkable performance that surpassed Andras Schiff's Hammerklavier. For Beethoven in general I am coming to the conclusion that Annie Fischer's was a wonderful compromise between appropriate tone (sometimes beautiful, sometimes rough), showy virtuosity, and depth of understanding.

p.s. Hammerklavier - also not the most difficult piece of all. It would certainly take stamina to play it right through, and a prodigious memory if you don't use the score, but give me any one page in isolation and I can make a decent stab at reading it at sight (I run out of steam given 2 or more pages) ... and that fact alone rules it out of contention.

How good's your arm-wrestling? Surely she couldn't ...

It would be nice to hear Rach's version of 39/6 decently recorded - anyone got a Tardis?

Yes, Schiff's Beethoven is hard to beat. Lisitsa does play the Hammerklavier from memory (there are two recordings on her YouTube channel - one live and one studio; she breaks a string in the live version and carries on with aplomb. It looks (from the dress and camera) as if she played the Hammerklavier at the same concert as the Rach Sonata #1, which I hadn't heard before, and which is also played wonderfully from her (prodigious) memory. I did wonder whether the piano was quite in tune, though....

Rachmaninoff's recording of 39/6 obviously can't be faulted- he wrote it.

Edwardo your comment about Lisista bringing menace to the piece; I admit I love her progression into the middle section and, surprise surprise, it's because it's slower playing. The rest is a bit of a blur to me. In the same league as Rachmaninoff's recording is Ashkenazy's, for me anyway.

I will go and have a listen to her Hammerklavier. To be honest I'd be more interested to hear her playing something non-flashy/technical; that's where you see the real calibre of a musician. I don't have anything against Lisista personally, just those kind of pianists (Argerich being in the same league) who can play all this flashy stuff at 10 and take everything at double speed. My theory is that they are bored of the music so speed it up to make it personally interesting, because they are so amazing so young they spend the rest of their lives searching for something else in music which they never find- I don't think Argerich even likes the piano tbh, I think it's all she's ever known. It's quite sad really.

I'd say Chopins etudes are much more than studies. Up until his first set, etudes by other composers admittedly had been purely mechanical by nature, but Chopin was the first to imbue them with poetic beauty.

I agree, and know what you meant by calling them 'more than studies', but regardless they are studies. I wrote an essay on the development of the piano study and there are a lot of things the Chopin etudes have in common with earlier studies such as Cramer and Moszkowski. Chopin brought something new to the genre which transformed it inspiring Liszt, Debussy etc. It is interesting that years later in the Debussy Etudes, he tries to almost reverse what Chopin did by stripping them of what you called poetic beauty and saying 'an etude is an etude'. And to be honest, I agree with Debussy; however beautiful an etude by any composer may be, fundamentally it was written based on a particular aspect of technique. After Debussy, with composers such as Ligeti, Nancarrow etc was when you could really say the nature of the piano etude was really changed as they became more like personal compositional exercises rather than technical, for example Nancarrow's experiments with piano rolls are called studies, but they are studies OF the piano rather than FOR the piano.

Anyway, coming back from my tangent, the Ligeti etudes are among the most difficult pieces, surely? They are trickier than any Chopin or Liszt etude at least.

the Rach 3

Very, very, very difficult. Definitely!

Most difficult? Almost certainly not.

Reminds me of a bloke I know in Holland.