Learning a 100 page piano concerto.

[crawf1ac]

For the longest time, I have been trying to get an answer to a simple question.

All I am wondering is how long it would take for a talented pianist to learn a concerto.

First of all, I realize it depends on the person. I also realize different concertos are different lengths and different levels of difficulty.

But I hear stories of kids learning to play Chopin's 1st concerto, to Rach 3, or hell, even Prok 2.

There have been pianists who performed Prok 2 at age 18. How is this possible? How many years would that take??

I've never gotten an answer or found an answer. Nor can I get a hold of professsional pianists to ask them

[avguste]

The amount of time needed to learn a concerto, to learn any piece for that matter depends on the amount of practice, talent and ability of the person.
Each person is different. I know pianists who are able to learn a new concerto within weeks, while others need month.
I don't think there is a right or wrong answer. It just depends on the person.

[thalbergmad]

The answer is anywhere between 24 hours and never.

Rather depends if you are John Ogdon or someone else.

Impossible question really.

Thal

[pianisten1989]

...

And it depends on how well you want to play it

[gep]

The answer is anywhere between 24 hours and never.

Rather depends if you are John Ogdon or someone else.

Impossible question really.

Thal

I have some vague recollection of reading somewhere that John Ogdon one replaced a pianist in a Rachmaninov concerto and when someone, rather surprised, noted Ogdon played the thing on sight when he earlier had said never to have studied the thing, Ogdon replied that he once had heard it on the radio, seeming surprised that anyone found that rather remarkable.
My recollection may be rather hazy here, so anyone who knows the real story, please do correct me!

John Ogdon was a pianist who was pretty much beyond believable until you hear him. Good Gawds.. Very great pity he hadn't more luck as a human being, suffering what he did.

gep

[pianist1976]

My recollection may be rather hazy here, so anyone who knows the real story, please do correct me!

In my opinion this is probably false or an exaggeration. There is a tendency to create myths and legends about some great pianists, and they seems to be getting amplified from person to person. Of course, they are great musicians but they are also human. I've heard the myth of someone learning Frank's variations in the train with no piano in one night, to play it with orchestra the next day... with no less than THREE different pianists as the leading role of the story depending on who tells it!

I think that reality is closer to stories like Richter learning Prokofiev 7th sonata. It took four days for him to play it by heart but according to Richter himself, there was 4 days of really hard work. He rehearsed this work, I don't remember exactly how many, about 10 hours a day (reference: "Richter, the enigma"). Of course learning a mammoth piece as Proko's 7th in four days is wonderful and something that not everybody can achieve but it's more human and believable than those, in my opinion, superman and superwoman stories about recording difficult pieces at sight, in half an hour, from ear or learning without piano.

In my opinion it's a known fact that a great pianist is a mixture of talent and hard work.

[thalbergmad]

I have some vague recollection of reading somewhere that John Ogdon one replaced a pianist in a Rachmaninov concerto and when someone, rather surprised, noted Ogdon played the thing on sight when he earlier had said never to have studied the thing, Ogdon replied that he once had heard it on the radio, seeming surprised that anyone found that rather remarkable.

I have the same recollection old chap, but i thought it was Brahms.

Will have to dig out me bio tonight.

No doubt Mr Hinton will know.

Thal

[ronde_des_sylphes]

I have some vague recollection of reading somewhere that John Ogdon one replaced a pianist in a Rachmaninov concerto and when someone, rather surprised, noted Ogdon played the thing on sight when he earlier had said never to have studied the thing, Ogdon replied that he once had heard it on the radio, seeming surprised that anyone found that rather remarkable.
My recollection may be rather hazy here, so anyone who knows the real story, please do correct me!

According to the version I heard, it was one of the Brahms concerti. Here's a story I was told about Ogdon's sight-reading. I'll assume it is accurate because I was told it by my teacher, who was also the interviewer in the anecdote.. Ogdon was being interviewed on a BBC arts programme, probably late 60s, and at the end of the programme was asked if he had a piece he would like to play to conclude the interview. Ogdon: "I'm not really working on anything just now" (or words to that effect). After some cajoling, he looked through the contents of a bag or case he had brought with him. He had been shopping in some London second-hand music store and pulled out a random piece of 19th century pianistic confectionery, went over to the studio piano and proceeded to sight-read it.

[birba]

It's enough to make you sick.   
Seriously, there is no answer to the initial question.  Like Thal said, anywhere from 24 hours to never.

[slow_concert_pianist]

What do you mean by "learn"?

Play it well enough to confuse the ignorant listener or play it to entrall the composer?

Personally I have never done well at "commiting to memory", so I don't try. Siatoslav Richter also saw no issue in performing from the score and as he is rated the greatest pianist of all time, I will follow his lead.

The Balakirev 2nd piano concerto runs to 104 pages according to my pdf references. Currently I am yawning through the Rachmaninov 2nd and am struggling to see how Hamelin found challenges comparable to Godowsky's sonata. Oh well, I guess why I'm the forum "idiot" !

[pianist1976]

Personally I have never done well at "commiting to memory", so I don't try. Siatoslav Richter also saw no issue in performing from the score and as he is rated the greatest pianist of all time, I will follow his lead.

The fact that Richter played with a score in his late years does not mean that he didn't memorize everything he played before an audience. The score was used by Richter as a safe but he always played by heart, he didn't sight read the scores in public. Memorizing is a mandatory step in order to play well any piece. Memorizing is internalizing the music and is an excellent mental exercise that no serious pianist can avoid

[viking]

I have the same recollection old chap, but i thought it was Brahms.

Will have to dig out me bio tonight.

No doubt Mr Hinton will know.

Thal

Brahms B-flat it was indeed, taken from his video documentary.  No doubt though that he had at least sight-read the score several times.  Maybe he had never taken a chunk of time out to properly study it..
No doubt there are many photocopiers out there in terms of learning rep quickly.  I played the first movement of Prok 2 at age 17... only because I had heard it the year before from a 16 year old!  But I really wouldn't consider myself a quick learner note-wise, quite the opposite.  Reading and learning comes quicker in the recognition of patterns, from notes to groups of notes, to groups of groups of notes, etc... Much like literature.

[nearenough]

The comment of learning the Franck piece on a train overnight refers to a Rubinstein anecdote, most likely recounted by R himself and thus accurate.

There is another story of Hofmann attending a Rachmaninoff concert and hearing an original newly composed piece (unpublished, obviously) which he played the following night for Rachmaninoff who he had teasingly invited.

Many players can sight read extremely well. I was using a piano in a practice room at the Peabody Institute years ago when a young lady entered and said she had reserved the piano for her practice. I asked if I could listen in. She said OK, and I heard her play Ravel's Jeux d'eau and a Ginastera Sonata. I asked, "Wow, how long did it take for you to learn that?" She said she just had bought the music and was sight reading it. (Why did I continue to bother playing?)

Also I heard recently that Ogdon recorded the 5-CD Opus Clavicembalisticum by Sorabji largely (or completely) sight reading it.

[birba]

The fact that Richter played with a score in his late years does not mean that he didn't memorize everything he played before an audience. The score was used by Richter as a safe but he always played by heart, he didn't sight read the scores in public. Memorizing is a mandatory step in order to play well any piece. Memorizing is internalizing the music and is an excellent mental exercise that no serious pianist can avoid

And for most of his career, he played WITHOUT the music.  And what a repertoire he had!

[richard black]

No, Ogdon certainly didn't record OC by sight-reading it. For a start, he played it to the composer and the work's dedicatee (Hugh McDiarmid) at Ronald Stevenson's house some time in the 1960s. And I know he did at least some practice before the recording because I was there and he told me so (and I choose to believe him because just about everyone who knew him will confirm John was apparently incapable of telling any kind of lie).

However, there's one thing I witnessed at the recording session of that piece that gives some idea of his sight-reading. OC is mostly written on 3 staves rather than the usual two, the division between the hands being entirely up to the player. They may be treble-treble-bass, treble-bass-bass, whatever. At one point, the producer (our good friend Alistair Hinton) realised that one of the score's many misprints results in the middle stave of the three having the wrong clef on it. John had played it as printed. Now personally I would say that having to re-think a passage like that is possibly even harder than sight-reading it, and the passage in question (don't ask me which page, this was nearly 25 years ago!) was of course rock-hard in the first place. John corrected it immediately, basically note-perfect, with no semblance of mental effort.

I reckon I once caught John sight-reading in a public recital. He player Grainger's paraphrase on Tchaikovsky's Flower Waltz, in which there is a very obvious misprint - one bar is missing. Because the theme is so well known, every pianist will do what I did when sight-reading this piece - stop at the mis-print, take a pencil and make some mark to indicate what should be there, and always play it correctly in future. John, in front of several hundred people, played the misprint as printed. In fairness, it probably wasn't his greatest performance of anything ever, but it wasn't half bad either.

The thing is that freak talents like that are perfectly capable of learning a truly new concerto in a couple of days. There are several stories about Busoni, for instance, learning new pieces just from reading them and then giving a performance - not just a playthrough but a real musical performance. It's just like the mathematical freaks who can multiply two 30-digit numbers instantaneously in their head. The rest of the world takes weeks or months. A relative of my wife's is married to a prominent concert pianist who is a merely 'good' (i.e. not freak) sight-reader, who can learn a concerto in a week if he has nothing else to do but prefers to spend a couple of months at least. That's more like the norm, frankly. That pianist in turn is very friendly with Radu Lupu, who I understand takes many months to learn a concerto - hence his repertoire is quite select. But he's one of the finest and most-sought-after pianists on the planet. It's the end result that matters!