who else is trying or considering "The Man I Love" and "I Got Rythm"
i've mentioned this before but The man i love seems much (may i stress: MUCH) easier than i got rythm. why bother putting them on the syllabus as a pair? i have them both in the same book, so i don't see how it could be simplified.

and is anyone familiar with the 3 "liebestraum" by Liszt. (all 3, not just the famous 3rd one). is no.2 is also on the syllabus - is it any good? out of interest, at what level (Dip, LRSM, FRSM) do people think no's 1 and 3 are?

I think (stress think) that Gae was talking about doing those, it may be worth pointing this thread out to him (he may see it anyway!) but I will have to take your word for the relative difficulty of the two pieces!

By putting them on as a pair I guess they're stopping people from getting an 'easy' ride (I'm taking your word on the relative difficulty by the way as I have no idea myself...) by just picking the easier one, which they still want to include on the syllabus. Maybe they thought the two go well together and one alone in a programme wouldn't be sufficiently long to be enough Gershwin to bother putting it in the programme (that's my stab at a reason for putting the easier one on the syllabus at all).

Anyway the point I'm meant to make is that if one picks a Beethoven Sonata, take the ubiquitous 'Moonlight Sonata' for example, then one gets two technically easier movements and the final movements with the bulk of the technical difficulty and speed required (not that, of course, the artistic difficulties of the others can be ignored). So there must be other pieces too where one is given an easier part for a breather/some filler to give one a chance to show mastery of a certain piece/part of a piece as sonatas in the real world have this: maybe people generally choose programmes to reflect this. It's likely that someone picking many short works for their diploma would have a harder programme than someone selecting a longer work as well as some shorter ones as each 2 minutes of the first person's programme would have to in itself justify being diploma level; rather than some hard part of a 20 minute piece (even if that hard part is 15 mintues of it!) making the rest of the piece be classified at that level.

Perhaps the AB are trying to stress the point that although virtuosity and technical work are very important they want to see how candidates can really handle something that's easily within their technical capacity and want to examine that aspect too. Or maybe it's used in the borderline cases to decide if the candidate hadn't been struggling quite so much technically how well they would have done (note that I say quite so much to ensure not meaning that anyone would pass with significant technical problems, I'm talking about borderline techincal problems, whatever they may be!).

i think i'd agree with you there, also the two pieces are very different, so i suppose they show the variety of gershwin's compositions.they're about as contrasted as any pair of his pieces can be (probably prompts some questions in the viva..) so by playing both you could also be showing diversity of interpretation, though you're showing this anyway if you have a varied programme as they ask you to!

regarding the Liszt Liberstraums, No.3 should be around high DipABRSM/low-mid LRSM and No.2 probably about Grade 8 to low DipABRSM

no.3 is definitely more technically demanding than diploma pieces i've seen, with the very rapid grace note passages etc. possible of course, with a bit of work on fingering but i'd still place it higher, than no.2, which IS on the diploma syllabus. so no.3 must be about low-mid LRSM in standard. (this is purely speculation)

the first one is harder than the second, but not as hard as the 3rd, so perhaps high-diploma. i don't think it's hard enough to be LRSM.