Variations on a theme (live recording on a Kawai RX-3)

I composed this piece a few months ago but was struggling to play the two faster variations so I asked a friend to play and record the piece. He is a composer and retired professor from Toronto. He added ornamentation to the repeats in the recording and gave me great feedback to help polish the piece. 

Nice!  This is a very good recording of your piece and I noticed you only play the final variation once!  I am glad you changed that as now the piece sounds like it has a more definite conclusion.  I did notice that some of the variations were missing ... ???  The march in measure 101 isn't there.  If it were my piece I would maybe get rid of some of the repeats of some of the variations and try to include some of the variations that weren't played in this version.  Thanks for sharing!

The B section of the March is quite demanding to play and we decided to leave it out. I composed two other variations initially but trimmed it down. I considered leaving out repeats but I think I would have to choose either no repeats or all repeats save for the ending. 

My plan going forward is to compose at my own level of piano ability so that I can upload live performances. I composed a trio to my latest minuet in F and I'm trying to record me playing it; its quite a frustrating endeavour. As soon as I press record I make a mistake, often near the end which makes it worse because I was almost there! 

OK so, first things first, the quality of the playing in the recording is top notch, but sadly the quality of the recording itself leaves a lot to be desired. Too bad.

Second, I think the score needs a lot of work. It's weirdly spaced and there's a lot of stuff that needs to be removed and edited. Additionally, it would help to have clear markings when each variation starts (along with the number.) Right now everything is just glued together and it's not pretty to read. Also, the score is lacking any dynamics, even if the recording actually has them to some degree (but then again not as much as it should be, leading to the whole thing sounding sort of flat.)

And on that note, I think the musical material is handled with competence, but it lacks a great deal of the experimental nature of what variations were meant to have back in the vienna classic. Take Mozart's Variations on a Minuet by Duport, K.573 (written in 1789,) which has some pretty wild sections (the coda specially) and obviously something like Beethoven's 32 Variations in C minor (WoO 80 from 1806) really stands out as being an extreme example. In contrast, your piece is adequate in the language, but it's too safe and thus ends up feeling more like an academic exercise.

I think that this is a fundamental issue with your piece here rather than something that you can just fix. I'd advise for the next variation cycle that you take a lot more liberties, both with rhythm as well as with the register changes and tempo differences. Also, it'd be cool if you took a note from Beethoven's C minor variations and linked the variations together in a sort of overarching structure, it makes the piece that much more interesting.

Thank you very much SSC. I'll take on board your suggestions for my next cycle. Your comments make are really helpful!!

very nice piece. You are proceeding very cautiously and confidently. the ornaments in the performance add vitality to the piece 

Good, very good. Live recordings are better than other variations. Have you ever tried musescore.com? A friend of mine told my about this stuff he also uploads his scores on this web site examples- https://musescore.com/user/7339591. Very usefull in case the originals are suddenly lost. 

A nice set of variations in the "Classical" style ... very Beethoven in feel.

Why don't you upload your score on https://musescore.com/hub/piano?text=variations ? I don't know how Roman found it, but it is good example of scoring web-site!