If you think Alkan, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff are crap, I won't call you a complete idiot for it, as some seem to want to do whenever someone disagrees with them. But I will ask what you think is good. The fact is, there's not much better in the piano repertoire. Chopin, Scriabin, Medtner for romantics. Bach and/or Scarlatti if that's your taste. Beethoven's certainly gotta be crap if Alkan and Liszt are. A few impressionists such as perhaps Ravel and a few 20th-century composers, again if that's your taste.
This is assuming that your musical taste is fairly open and spans the history of piano composition. If your taste is light-years away from Alkan or his contemporaries anyway, then I don't know why you're posting in this thread in the first place.
Well, maybe I overstated a bit. And I avoided any personal insults (which cannot be said for others)
I posted in this thread because insane comments were being made (by 'max', who surely knows nothing about higher maths, for starters).What I find offensive is
1. the childish search for the 'most hard or impossible to play' piece. There is really no merit at all in a piece being difficult or impossible to play. Only the musical merits of the piece should be relevant (even here).
2. The assumption that it's allways harder to play faster. It sometimes is not.
3. the faillure to accept that 'difficulty' is a subjective matter. It's not objective at all.
On a general note, I would want to add that I thought it was rather commonly accepted that the typical 'piano' composers were really not the greatest of them all? To me, the great piano composers are Chopin and Scriabin (although scriabin was a very good orchestrator with constantly improving skills) and Schumann (less a typical piano composer - wrote some very difficult stuff too and sometimes prescribed insane tempi). Others who were not specific piano composers wrote great piano music too (Beethoven, Bach (not really piano, but I don't care), Prokofiev and many many others of course). I really don't like Alkan's music, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only one, and, as a matter of fact, the few people who dó seem to like it are ....pianists (I find that very suspicious -you could say the same thing about Paganini and some violonists, f.i.).
I understand that my personal taste is of no relevance here, but, in my opinion, Alkan's music is only played by very few, because only very few want to bother, not because it's too difficult.
Please take into account that I'm not an anglophone, so some words may have come out harder than intended.
There really is more to 'pianism' than playing as rapid as physically possible!
Topic: Alkan=Overrated Difficulty