Schubert/Liszt Erlkonig

[jinfiesto]

It's been several years since I've posted here. I studied piano performance in college for a bit and ended up dropping out for financial reasons. After college I ended up pursuing a career in Software Engineering and hadn't really played until my daughter was born when I picked up piano again (about 2 years ago.) These days, between 2 kids and a full time job I'm lucky if I get to practice 30 minutes a day (hour on a good day,) so I'm definitely not in the shape I used to be and the days of me playing things note-perfectly are probably past.

Anyways, on to the piece. I've been playing this for about a month and a half, and I'm reasonably happy with where it's at given that I don't get to practice very much. For some reason it takes me a bit to "get into it" before the left hand octaves have the right attack (they just seem a bit sluggish on the first page.) I'm probably the least happy with the first page, and I play a few fistfuls of wrong notes at the end on account of being a bit tired and there are a few bad pedals scattered here or there, but otherwise I'm reasonably pleased. Apologies for the potato recording quality. I had to really turn it down to stop the mic from clipping and so it's really flat sounding (hopefully it doesn't sound like this irl.)

[tnan123]

Yes, the recording quality is terrible, but very nice performance. I admire the stamina you show in this piece. I haven't played this piece (but know it well enough) and these quick repeated octaves can get quite tiring if you play with a lot of tension.

You do a good job bringing out the melody but it gets lost later in the piece at times. Thanks for sharing. Really inspiring effort given your job and family responsibilities!

[jinfiesto]

I have pretty good wrist technique in general, and octaves have never been a problem. I think it's one of those things like thirds where it's either a total non-issue or a huge mountain to climb just depending on the person. Double thirds and sixths were really rough for me (took me a long time before double thirds etude clicked,) but octaves have never been too bad.

Granted, the Erlking is six minutes of octaves, so even though my octaves are pretty decent I do start getting a bit tired at the end haha.

Yeah, something that bugs me about my playing in this piece still besides the voicing is that I also sometimes let the melody get "clipped" by whiffing pedals here and there.