Hardest piece you know?

Barber Piano concerto

The hardest im trying to teach myself at the moment is Chopin's ballade no.1

I don't know if its been mentioned but i think Rachmaninov's third piano concerto is one of the hardest there is...

Ah! I too am working on Chopin's Ballade no. 1. :thumbsup:

It's an awesome piece!

how about nikolai kapustin? and his piano

music?

though i don't play, it seems quite difficult to me.

:evil:

Barber Piano concerto

UGH! those parallel 6ths...

and John Browning actually ASKED Barber to put those in!!!!!

he must have had a maschoistic streak a mile wide!

The rest of the concerto is, surprisingly, quite playable. A few stretches here and there, and some difficult rythmic passsges, but it fits well into the hand (Barber was an excellent pianist himself).

I think, other than those 6ths in the 1st movement of the concerto, the Piano Sonata is actually, overall, more difficult to play.

Brian flipping Ferneyhough.

Check out his scores sometime - they are absolute murder.

How about Liszt's Scherzo and March in B minor for piano, or the Transcendental studies (especially Feux Follets and Mazeppa)?

Or Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum?

They are the hardest piano pieces I've heard of.

For chamber music, I'd have to say the holy grail of hard is usually Stravinsky. Soldier's Tale and the Septet are both ridiculous and require a very talented group to put together well. My faculty performing ensemble did Soldier's tale very well, but completely botched the septet when they attempted it.

Technically hard string pieces:

1) Ravel - Tzigane: I wouldn't call this the "hardest" piece, but this is one of the harder pieces of college/early professional repertoire. Just playing it isn't that hard, but playing it well is a different story (and I wouldn't call Joshua Bell's recording well-done).

2) Ernst - Last Rose of Summer variations. Many of the variations involve the violin harmonizing itself along with many instances of combined pizz/arco. The Hilary Hahn recording of it is fairly good. Come to think of it, most of Ernst's music is ridiculous.

3) Walton - Viola Concerto. It's not performed as often as the Bartok or the Hindemith, and for modern repetoire, I think it's a fairly difficult piece for the instrument.

4) Gershwin - Preludes for violin.

Hard Chamber pieces:

1) Stravinsky - entire catalog. I don't think this man believed in writing music that wasn't insane. Rite of Spring stands out as a doozie (I just saw the Boulez DVD of this <3 ), though Petroushka is harder than people give it credit for.

2) Messian - End of the World quartet. Ridiculous.

3) Chausson - Concerto for Piano, Violin, and String Quartet. It may not be the most technically challenging, but for such a small orchestration, it's so large-scale that the sheer profoundness implied can be quite difficult.

4) Mahler - any symphony. Huge orchestrations, technically very challenging, polyrhythmic, and musically sometimes very difficult to grasp.

Hardest pieces I've played:

1) Butterworth - Suite for Viola and Cello - I haven't played with a good cellist since high school, but I remember these being extremely rhythmically involved, especially since they were inspired by folk dances.

2) Hindemith - Viola Sonata no. 4

3) Bartok - Violin Rhapsody no. 2

4) Elgar - Cello Concerto (as played on Viola)

I know several pianists who have played the Grieg a minor and haven't really found it difficult. Musically, I find it hard, only because it's hard to bear that long of an unbroken streak of 4-measure phrases.

Balakirev - Islamey. Im sure its been mentioned at least once in this thread...but 'sif im gonna read it. This would have to be the hardest piece I've seen...but like everything else on this 'Hardest Piece List', I cant compare because I have not seen the scores.

The more modern music, such as Schoenberg, Webern, and this other guy who's name surpases me, is difficult because you can't play most of their music expecting to find a beautiful melody. Its all a patience game, taking the random sequence of notes and playing them in a succession which makes it look like you know what you are doing.

Other than that, my post seems rather useless. But yes, i will stick with Balakirev's music.

The more modern music, such as Schoenberg, Webern, and this other guy who's name surpases me, is difficult because you can't play most of their music expecting to find a beautiful melody. Its all a patience game, taking the random sequence of notes and playing them in a succession which makes it look like you know what you are doing.

Sch

Stockhausen's pieces for piano, 10 in particular. I know someone mentioned this, but I must stress that this is probably the single most incredibly obscene thing I've ever seen in terms of difficulty. It's a 20+ minute long "miss a note and you're fucked" cluster glissandi and ridiculous dynamic fest. Looking at the score for it is just wow, and shouldn't be missed.

Most serialist music is almost impossible to play 100%, since if even one note is wrong the entire piece is wrong, since each tone is as important as the next. Really stressing on performers, and one of the reasons people began experimenting with electronic music in the first place. Real people couldn't play this stuff good enough, no matter who it was.

And yet, unless you're following with a score or have it memorized, or are 99% of all listeners, NOBODY WILL NOTICE IF YOU MAKE A MISTAKE.

That's, uh. Sorry to say, either incredibly ignorant or just downright retarded. If we'll go in that direction, might as well improvise half of all modern pieces since nobody's going to be able to tell the difference.

Jesus, what the hell. It doesn't MATTER if anyone doesn't notice you made an error. That's not the point, and clearly if it were why even bother reading scores properly or studying? Since "nobody will notice if you make a mistake" just do something around what is written and that's it.

I suppose that if you were the composer of one such pieces, you'd settle for a mediocre performance since "99%" of the people won't be able to tell. Furthermore, if the musician playing such serialist piece understands the concept of serialism, they would demand of themselves a flawless performance regardless of the difficulty involved. It's unrealistic to expect it to be that way in a concert, as if there's an error the entire piece is compromised. So, nobody really wants to play these sort of pieces because it's a lot of responsibility studying 3 or 4 years just to play one piece and have it screw up in concert because of a single note and fail.

Again, that's why a lot of people moved to trying to do this in electronic music, since a perfect finished recording doesn't make mistakes no matter how many times you play it. If you're a composer looking for 100% accuracy every time, because it's NEEDED, then that's a good way to do it.

Sch

Well...my point really was just, it's far from your traditional melodic lines like that of Beethoven...a normal human, who is non musically trained, would not be able to listen to a Schoenberg melodic line (and im talking about the yucky stuff here), and then sing it back to me...and actually enjoy it. Whereas, with a melodic line like that of Mozart, it could be easily achieved...most times.

That's, uh. Sorry to say, either incredibly ignorant or just downright retarded. If we'll go in that direction, might as well improvise half of all modern pieces since nobody's going to be able to tell the difference.

Jesus, what the hell. It doesn't MATTER if anyone doesn't notice you made an error. That's not the point, and clearly if it were why even bother reading scores properly or studying? Since "nobody will notice if you make a mistake" just do something around what is written and that's it.

I suppose that if you were the composer of one such pieces, you'd settle for a mediocre performance since "99%" of the people won't be able to tell. Furthermore, if the musician playing such serialist piece understands the concept of serialism, they would demand of themselves a flawless performance regardless of the difficulty involved. It's unrealistic to expect it to be that way in a concert, as if there's an error the entire piece is compromised. So, nobody really wants to play these sort of pieces because it's a lot of responsibility studying 3 or 4 years just to play one piece and have it screw up in concert because of a single note and fail.

Again, that's why a lot of people moved to trying to do this in electronic music, since a perfect finished recording doesn't make mistakes no matter how many times you play it. If you're a composer looking for 100% accuracy every time, because it's NEEDED, then that's a good way to do it.

You've taken the original comment wrong- What Nico meant to SAY was that if you're playing the piece and you accidentally flub in some way or another, hardly anyone is going to notice as long as the mistake wasn't huge (like forgetting the next section) or if you just go on and don't make any signs of the difficulty. He did NOT mean things like dynamics and other things (while usually the audience STILL won't know if it's wrong). And don't forget- most audiences are NOT concert musicians- most know music only as it is taught in school, and they just want to hear music. They aren't going to be mad if the performer misses a note in a chord or something so trivial. And isn't music intended for an audience? :D

You've taken the original comment wrong- What Nico meant to SAY was that if you're playing the piece and you accidentally flub in some way or another, hardly anyone is going to notice as long as the mistake wasn't huge (like forgetting the next section) or if you just go on and don't make any signs of the difficulty. He did NOT mean things like dynamics and other things (while usually the audience STILL won't know if it's wrong). And don't forget- most audiences are NOT concert musicians- most know music only as it is taught in school, and they just want to hear music. They aren't going to be mad if the performer misses a note in a chord or something so trivial. And isn't music intended for an audience? :D

Fair enough, but the point was that to a composer, if 100% accuracy is necessary, then that's all that matters. Audience or not, the composer's intention comes first. This is what I mean.

I certainly agree that singing back a Sch

Sorabji is also hard...beacuse his pieces are long. thats the other guy i forgot to mention.

Yes, but Sorabji wrote his music specifically to be ridiculously hard. Opus Clavicembalisjtjbiocwocwwhatever is sometimes written on like 7 or 8 staves for one single piano player!! He seemed to have some sort of God complex...

But for truly nightmarish rehearsals of a piece, take it from me - Gyorgy Ligeti's Chamber Concerto for 13 instruments is by far the worst I've dealt with. Listening to it, you get the sense that Ligeti was going for a 'mass of sound' idea, and playing under a conductor along with the other 12 players, you indeed still get that sense. It is so freaking complicated because of this. Not to mention that I'm playing on a synthesizer I don't fully understand...!

good question....im going to have to say that the hardest piece of music i've performed is African Sanctus by Fanshawe, it's incredibly dissonant and the chords are very strange -- add some mixed meter in and it's tons of fun. However, close second is Chichester Psalms.

One that i want to do:

Symphony of Psalms....bring it on :D

Ligeti is a scallop any way you slice it. Sorabji is also a scallop-5 hour piece for the sake of making it five hours. Roar.

Personally Sequenza XII and Samuel Adler's Canto XII for solo bassoon gives me a headache. the serenade is a scallop (its a big rip off of the rite).

Stravinsky is a genius IMO.

Oh is there a good recording of the End of the World Quartett?

YouTube - Opus Clavicembalisticum Played Excatly as Written!

Opus Clavicembalisticum as written

YouTube - Opus Clavicembalisticum on a Virtual Piano

Even more maddening than the first link. ENJOY!

Hardest piece I have played in its entirety => Liszt Paraphrase on Wedding March and Dance of Elves

Hardest piece I have attempted and gave up => Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit

I've played Fliszt's 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody... was one of the 1st pieces I ever really learned besides F

Liszt's "La Campanella"

Definitely Andr

The hardest solo piece I've come across is probably Dvorak's Cello Concerto in B minor. The 2nd movement is playable, but the 1st and 3rd...they're just cruel! Still, they do make very good, yet musically interesting, technique exercises.

The hardest orchestral piece I've been a part of is The Rite of Spring. I was on Eb clarinet, so the technical difficulty (or lack thereof) of my part wasn't a problem, it was the sheer level of concentration needed. Constantly. I've never counted so hard in my entire life!