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If this is a piece that you really want to "conquer," then perhaps consider letting it go for a month or so. Then relearn it as if it's a brand new piece (it's not of course, you just want to take it very slowly and not try to play it like you did when you last played it since the muscle memory will be gone). You will relearn it much faster than it took to learn it, and many things will become much more natural feeling when you do this. I try to incorporate these long breaks with pieces that I learn for this very purpose.

Good advice; it certainly works very well for me.

Regards,

This morning I watched Josh Wright's youtube video on slow practice. It is such a good reminder on how to approach those difficult (nay impossible) passages. I recommend it.

I was very confused by this sentence. What exactly do you mean by this ?

Can you identify smaller increments of progress to measure?

I took a look at the piece and the measures you are talking about. These remind me of a bunch of Czerny exercises my teacher had me play. Like the saying "there's an app for that." I would say "there's a Czerny for that." It's allegro and my teacher helped me go faster and faster. I usually prepare the pieces I'm working on to play at tempo for my teacher. But not for Czerny exercises. The reason is because I can spend a long time killing myself trying to go fast and getting sore fingers and still can't play these fast and smooth. I'm better off showing up to lesson "unprepared" on these exercises and my teacher will show me how to play and what to practice in order to go very fast. Typically I would have made substantial improvement by the end of the lesson.

There was a thread on here about the value of technical exercises. If I was playing this Gurlitt piece I'd be drawing on what I had previously learned from Czerny exercises. If you change the fingering you are not addressing your weaknesses.

Pronation and supination: rotating the wrist back and forth. This causes the two “trill” fingers being used to alternately depress the keys.

Using fingers alone: not rotating the wrist. Instead, lifting and lowering the fingers alternately up and down to depress the keys.

(Wrist supination and pronation.)