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Gryphon,

You really ought to give Villa-Lobos a try. Try to find a copy of his Ciclo Brasileiros or Prole do Bébé Volume I. He throws all sorts of touches and rhythms at you, the full range of emotions and it's fun, fun, FUN!

Drews

PS -- my problem is that I never thoroughly *learn* any piece of music. There's so much great repertoire out there to try out...

Loud and fast = easy

Soft and fast != easy

Agreed. I attempted the piece and managed to get 2 or 3 pages down without much trouble, but to get it up to par and at the required speed AS WELL AS playing with musicality and managing to keep a light touch is a feat indeed.

Chopin's Ballade #4 is the most technically challenging piece ever written in my humble opinion.

Steve
Bösendorfer 170

In addition to many that have been mentioned, I'd throw in Chopin's Winterwind Etude and Beethoven's Hammerklavier 4th movement. In the end it's all subjective.

Out of these three concertos: Grieg Piano Concerto in A Minor, Franck Symphonic Variations and Mendelssohn Piano Concerto No.1 in G Minor, what is the order of difficulty?

Thanks

"Beware the fury of a patient man"(unknown)

Oh come on! Chopin Op. 25 No. 5. It is physically impossible not to play wrong notes in this etude. (Though, as Mark C has pointed out, for most of us all of Chopin's Op. 10 and 25 are "wrong note" etudes!)

Almost made me spit my tea!

liszt feux follets
schoenberg piano concerto
ligeti etudes
prokofiev piano concertos
rachmaninoff piano concerto no. 3
alkan piano pieces

Villa-Lobos composed over 2000 pieces for a variety of instruments, solos, concertos, symphonies, chamber music, ...

I was able to count 34 compositions for guitar. Rudapoema is likely the most difficult work for solo piano composed by Villa-Lobos. It is a long, large scale work.

Here is Rubinstein playing O Polichinello (The Clown Doll) from Villa-Lobos's A Prole do Bebe Suite #1. This was an encore from a recital Rubinstein gave in Moscow in the early 1960's.

The zombie thread that won’t die— created in 2001, but periodically raises its head again

There is nothing wrong with old threads. Many new threads are just paraphrasings of old threads.

Liszt's transcription of Beethoven's symphonies. #7 and #9 are the hardest by default, #1 would be the "easiest" but still very dang difficult.

Difficult to play all the notes without mistakes? Difficult to get the piece to a point where it's listenable? Difficult to interpret? Physically demanding?

Depending on which sense of difficult you go for, you'll end up with a very different list of pieces, and you can't really compare across them (though people often do).

And of course you can make any piece more difficult by simply playing it faster — every time you increase the speed of Chopin's Op. 10 No. 1 by 10% you increase the difficulty significantly, and a lot of headspinning virtuosity comes down to taking an already difficult piece and just doing it faster. But while it has its nuances, as something to be interpreted, Op. 10 No. 1 is less difficult than a Bach 2-part invention.

There are plenty of piano pieces that are essentially unplayable — as in, they are written for player piano or disklavier, etc. Still lovely pieces, but technically more difficult than anything Rachmaninov wrote. Not just for the sake of being difficult or just to torture pianists, but because at a beyond-human level of complexity, other patterns can emerge that are interesting to hear.