Piano Forum

If you need to have these done in the near future and are not simply playing through the pieces as you plan for the performance then this is just a drain of your time. Ideally you would want to have mastered the pieces prepared for performance many months or even years before and merely play them all from start to finish as a means to keep them polished.

If it is in the distant future that you want to present these then you have to measure how many pieces you can study effectively at once. Playing pieces at this level you should already know quite well what this limit is and if not then it's time to investigate. Once a piece is mastered all you need to do is play through it to maintain it rather than practice through it, perhaps there may be a very small % of the piece that you may practice though you want to keep the amount here very low otherwise you simply will not be able to manage it once you add the rest of your repertoire for preparation. You do need to keep constant contact with pieces you are preparing for performance and at least play them all once every few days. If the time between playing a piece is left too long things start to get forgotten especially if you are not using sheet music.

As a matter of learning pieces from the beginning you should be capable to use the score and read through the piece multiple times and get from start to finish, doing this over time one will naturally learn most of the piece and then filling in the small gaps with practice drills becomes more apparent. Reading skills need to be at a high level and then awareness and efficient practice method are used to target and to fill in the gaps respectively. In most cases it is inefficient to try to memorize the entire score bar by bar, it is much better to get that overall view from reading and then allow the memorisation process to occur predominantly and especially initially through that constant contact with the entire piece. It is also helpful to paste the pieces you study on a wall to see it in one view, highlighting the parts of the piece and patterns you may observe, this is especially helpful for those visually inclinded and helps have that overall view of a larger body of works.

When I read your ideas of drills single handed, alterations of articulation, rhythm etc these are fine in very very small doses, if you are relying on these tools you simply will be wasting your time, you need to get on with the job of playing it at performance level and not creep to the result. With the amount of works and level you have presented there is simply no room for such beginner/intermediate tools to take centre stage, you should predominantly play large parts of these at concert level in quick time. If you find that this is a crazy idea then the level of the pieces you are trying to study is too hard for you and most probably you will find this a very difficult task to contend with. In that case you should build up your playing/practice method so that you can deal with it at this level of efficiency.