Piano Forum

Personally I'd put Vallee d'Obermann after Au Bord d'une Source. Memory lapses in such a big piece (with lots of passages which are not hard, so you will tend to practice them less) are a real issue. Au Bord d'Une Source is hard throughout and you will likely learn the entire work just via motoric memorisation.

It also depends on how you'd play Vallee d'Obermann. compare Ervin Nyiregyházi and France Clidat's recordings. Tempo choices impact the difficulty of the Obermann coda and some of the cadenza parts in between, tremendously, but a slower approach might still yield a good performance and massively cut back on practice time... Ervin Nyiregyházi is at times half as fast as France Clidat and his performances were still received well by major critics like Harold C. Schonberg.

If I had to perform this opus (or any set of works) this long, I'd always have a 'Blattlaus' (page turner) at hand + take the slowest tempo permissible in performance (also relative to other tempi I use) in technically hard passages. Try to balance practice time vs, result at all times.



Hope this helps.