The hardest operatic fantasies

[ronde_des_sylphes]

A bit of fun. I put together a video with samples from what I believe to be the most demanding paraphrases in the romantic style. So a lot of Liszt, obviously, and the likes of Sorabji and Finnissy don't get included. I've been a touch naughty and included a few of my compositions, but they are genuinely quite difficult, so I'm emphatically not being facetious with their inclusion. Some famous pieces here, of course, and some definitely not so famous. I'm sure Thal and visitor will enjoy this if they see it, and hopefully it might amuse a few others. There is some truly stellar piano playing at some points in this video!

It's not an attempt to create an absolute hierarchy, but I'm sure that most people would agree that those at the end are really hard whereas those at ths start are merely difficult.

[lelle]

Haha, this is really fun  I really think you should include time codes in the video description though, I wanted to hop around a bit and also easily find my way back to a certain pianist/piece, but could not do so 

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Yeah, I'll incorporate that shortly.. I meant to include that but went out in a hurry this morning having just uploaded it and didn't get round to writing everything down to edit in later.

(Done now.)

[lelle]

Yeah, I'll incorporate that shortly.. I meant to include that but went out in a hurry this morning having just uploaded it and didn't get round to writing everything down to edit in later.

(Done now.)

Great! It's made the video even more awesome 

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Thanks 

One of my regular channel viewers was kind enough to write a comment with the full details of each extract (diacritics and all!) so I pinned it.

[ahinton]

"the likes of Sorabji and Finnissy don't get included". Any reason for that? And any other exclusions?...

Best,

Alistair

[ronde_des_sylphes]

I put together a video with samples from what I believe to be the most demanding paraphrases in the romantic style.

I don't think anyone can realistically describe either Sorabji or Finnissy as romantic. Plus restricting it to the romantic style means that I was selecting from repertoire I'm familiar with: in around a dozen examples that familiarity is at the performance level. As it happens I played three of them in public the week before making the video, but they were mostly at the "easier" end of the selection.

[ranjit]

Do Sorabji and Finnissy even have operatic fantaisies?

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Finnissy did ones on Verdi and there is a Sorabji 'pastiche' on Carmen.