Musical Madness 2025! The (first) group of death!

[liszt-and-the-galops]

Link to the form for voting: https://forms.gle/oe4Lqkbdp4LDpmqr7

Pieces in the matches:
Liszt - S. 137 no. 5 "Feux Follets"
Schubert/Liszt - Erlkönig

Alkan - Op. 17 Le Preux
Rachmaninoff - Moment Musicaux no. 6

Liszt - S. 140 no. 4 "Arpeggio"
Chopin - Etude op. 25 no. 6 "Double Thirds"

Scriabin - Etude op. 42 no 5
Stravinsky - Trois Mouvements de Petrushka


Current bracket: https://challonge.com/musicalmadness2025
Winners of the last matchups: Ondine, Lavapiés, Saint-Saëns Toccata, Allegro Barbaro
Results page on MM website: https://sites.google.com/view/musicalmadness-ps/voting-results
Matches/results spreadsheet: https://1drv.ms/x/c/373bca7cb13fd958/ERCeNi1RJdVCuYiYk2KhQlkBEpSOnfoDFbYla3MknPz-vA?e=oxosxa&nav=MTVfezAwMDAwMDAwLTAwMDEtMDAwMC0wMDAwLTAwMDAwMDAwMDAwMH0

This thread also doubles as the official discussion thread for these four matches and the results of the previous four.
Voting closes at 5:00 PM on March 6th, 2025 (US Eastern time).

[transitional]

WHAT??? Fauré Ballade out in the first round is criminal. It's the only piece I had moving on despite not sounding "hard" or using the stereotypes. Maybe it's just me.

[liszt-and-the-galops]

WHAT??? Fauré Ballade out in the first round is criminal. It's the only piece I had moving on despite not sounding "hard" or using the stereotypes. Maybe it's just me.

Definitely not just you. If there was a piece that was going to kill off the last three perfect brackets at once, that was the one I would have preferred -- if only for the fact that it's one of my favorite pieces. I'm seriously disappointed that it currently has the least votes of any R1 piece (tied with Chopin Grande Polonaise Brillante) (hopefully Petrushka will change that lol).
TBH I feel like it would have made a pretty deep tournament run, if it hadn't been matched up against one of the most difficult pieces in the tournament in the first round. It's a lot like last year's Ondine in that regard: a beautiful, extremely difficult piece in an impossible R1 matchup.
Only thing to do is just hope for a better result next year.

[thorn]

Yeah Lavapiés is a b*tch. Albéniz nearly burned the score thinking he'd written something unplayable. The recording used in this contest is actually Larrocha's slowest lol, she normally clocks a minute faster (and her first recording was just under 6 minutes!).

I also think if Ondine beats Lavapiés in the next round it'll be because it's better known and looks heavier on the page. Ravel never wrote anything that was unpianistic, Lavapiés is one of the least pianistic things in the standard repertoire. Ondine is my favourite of the two pieces but I've played it for many years, Lavapiés is harder!