Frustrating Practise Session

[mrpianoman80]

Alright, today was the most frustrating practise session I had in ages. I'm learning a difficult piano concerto and I have the first movement almost performance ready. That's great! Working on the second movement has been great as well but it is also very technically demanding.

I haven't worked on the first movement in about a month and decided just to play through it. It was a lot worse than I expected. After putting in about 4 hours improving some sections of the first movement I decided to start working on the second movement again. By hour 6, though, I was burnt out and hardly put any time into the second movement.

This was VERY annoying and frustrating. I wish their was a magic button you could press that 'locks-in' how well you play a particular movement so you can spend more time on new material.

It's such a large concerto and I feel like I should mainly focus on the second movement and then learn the third movement. Once I have all the notes down, I should then come back and polish the whole thing. How do you approach learning long works like concertos?

[pianistavt]

I'd say I'm not surprised - having not played a technically demanding piece for a month, a piece that you've learned for the first time ... you should play through it every 2nd or 3rd day for a while.

[mrpianoman80]

I was doing that at the start but I thought I would spend some time focussing just on the second movement. I guess I will keep doing that and worry about polishing everything once I've learnt the notes to the whole concerto. I'll just have to deal with the fact that it won't be as solid as it was initially. Either way, it's nice to rant a little here and vocalise my frustration!  😀