Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner wow

My teacher performed Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini tonight. I was talking with him before the concert, and I remembered that he had just recently learned this piece.

"Yeah, I started learning it after I got back from Moscow" (the beginning of January 2006).

"So you learned the entire Rhapsody in a month and a half and now you're performing it?"

"Well, I performed it with an orchestra already, in January, so I should be fine tonight."




(and, that was only one of several pieces that he was working on at the time)


He played it sooooo well tonight (from memory).

He must be an alien - no question about it. There just doesn't exist a human being who could achieve this!

Every famous and semi-famous concert pianist can prepare a concerto from scratch in three weeks. Some won't, as a matter of principle, and some never need to, but they all can.

OK, I'm generalizing a bit, but what you've observed is the rule, Sam, not the exception.

My college professor learned the Saint-Saens second concerto over two days before performing it in public.

Ummm... "Wow"

You hear of certain pianists who can play pretty much anything at first sight, so for them presumably learning a concerto may not entail more than playing it through several times to memorize it.

With performing concert pianist this is not too 'out of the norm'. It's a well-known fact that Ashkenazy, Kalishtein, Biret, Barenboim and others learn a concerto or full length sonata from 'cold' and commit to memory within a week or two. Richter was another example of super fast learner. In this day and time you almost HAVE to be a fast learner to make the cut, so to speak.

Yup, you have to be ready to go, plain and simple. If you aren't, there are 400 other similing young pianists who are, and you don't want to make a reputation as someone who turns things down.

i am sooo underemployed

Perhaps thats why almost every recording or performance that I hear of my favourite concertos sound shoddy, under-practiced and rushed. No matter how skilled a pianist I was, I couldn't allow myself to play something like that without having nailed it perfectly beforehand, unless I despised the piece.