Nearly Impossible Pieces for Solo Mandolin

[margora]

Eugene's posting in the Siegel thread on one of Siegel's next to impossible pieces prompts this thread.

For some time I have collected extremely difficult works for classical guitar, and I have started a similar collection for solo mandolin. I look at these from time to time, mainly as a source of amusement, but occasionally, of inspiration. To be clear I am speaking of pieces that are:

--extremely difficult for people who have professional level techniques. The rest of us may find some piece difficult, but what I am talking about is virtuouso level for virtuosi.

--the piece actually has to be performable as evidenced by an actual performance, or failing evidence of this, a published (not mss) score. For example, as Neil Gladd has pointed out, Aubrey Stauffer made many arrangements for solo mandolin for which no one knows if he actually gave a performance -- but he did publish the arrangements and some of these are truly (truly) difficult.

--the piece is for SOLO mandolin ORIGINALLY. This rules out extremely difficult parts for mandolin in chamber works (e.g. Zappa, the Ranieri concerto) or arrangements (various Paganini caprices).

So, to get the ball rolling, a piece that I consider nearly impossible, or at least extremely (extremely) difficult is Ernesto Rocco's "Serenade". We know it is performable because Rocco (and one or two others) played it, and it certainly was published. In his book Paul Sparks singles out the Serenade as an example of an extremely difficult piece of solo mandolin music. It certainly is for me -- I can get through the first page or so, but after a while, it is too much.

I would be interested in other examples. Among people who post here I am sure that Michael Hooper, Joe Brent, Chris Aquavella, Richard Walz have their favorite impossible pieces. I'd also love to know which pieces that Gertrud (or any number of Germans) finds difficult, ditto Alex and his students, ditto Carlo.

[Eugene]

A marvelously fun thread! Whenever given the opportunity to do so, I admit to being a huge fan of Neil Gladd's Sonata II for solo mandolin, one of my very favorite recent works for unaccompanied mandolin. I like its brief-but-satisfyingly-unifying atonal theme. Simply love the sound of the whole, but especially the quirky and rhythmic toccata and the finger-busting fugue the sonata contains. ...And I know that Neil himself performs it (having heard him do so twice). ...And I know that I haven't been able to do so myself. I selfishly wish somebody would record it so I didn't have to depend on memory to "hear" it.

[Jim Garber]

I will definitely lurk on this thread... the bulk of the virtuoso pieces are way beyond me. I look fwd to hear what does come up. In the meantime, where can I hear Rocco's "Serenade".

[margora]

"A marvelously fun thread! Whenever given the opportunity to do so, I admit to being a huge fan of Neil Gladd's Sonata II for solo mandolin, one of my very favorite recent works for unaccompanied mandolin. I like its brief-but-satisfyingly-unifying atonal theme. Simply love the sound of the whole, but especially the quirky and rhythmic toccata and the finger-busting fugue the sonata contains. ...And I know that Neil himself performs it (having heard him do so twice). ...And I know that I haven't been able to do so myself. I selfishly wish somebody would record it so I didn't have to depend on memory to "hear" it"

Hi Eugene -- I myself play Neil's Sonata I for solo mandolin, a very fine piece and certainly a standard of the modern repertoire. While Sonata I is clearly a professional level piece, it is by no means impossible --- otherwise, I wouldn't be able to play it! I would love to try his Sonata II, but the piece is still unpublished.

"In the meantime, where can I hear Rocco's "Serenade"."

Hi Jim, answer: you can't, to the best of my knowledge. Rocco never recorded it, and there are no modern recordings. The piece itself is long out of print but was available on the Nakano site. I suspect there are friends of ours in Europe who perform on Emberger instruments who may have made progress on this piece.

[vkioulaphides]

I will eventually, with all due modesty, submit my own Sweelinck Variations, written for Sebastiaan de Grebber. While it is certainly playable, I have reason to suspect that, even after Sebastiaan premieres it, and it becomes yet another free download, the takers will be few and far between...

All in its due time, though. When you see this score, you will know what I meant.

Cheers,

Victor

[Eugene]

I am fortunate to own copies of both Neil's sonatas. I personally feel the second to be much more substantially difficult than the first.

Upon what tune is your Sweelinck Variations based, Victor?

[margora]

"I will eventually, with all due modesty, submit my own Sweelinck Variations, written for Sebastiaan de Grebber. While it is certainly playable, I have reason to suspect that, even after Sebastiaan premieres it, and it becomes yet another free download, the takers will be few and far between..."

Well, as you know, Victor, I am eagerly awaiting the release of the Sweelinck Variations; I check the relevant website of your music at regular intervals!

Oh, and Eugene kindly sent me the Siegel piece. It is, indeed, very difficult.

[eightmoremiles]

One of Siegel's pieces in my collection is the formidable "Boston Ideal March". Although not a solo, it demands a great deal of the Mando I player. It also demands much of your printer. If you decide to print a copy of it you would be advised to put in a new cartridge to make sure you have enough ink to print all the notes, even though it is only one page.
Don't play this on an empty stomach.

[Richard Walz]

I've played Rocco's serenade and, it is indeed very difficult, not nearly as physically challenging as many of Stauffer's solos. Stauffer is usually writing with full stops pulled, in other words 4 string tremolos and finger twisting chord figurations from start to finish. I have studied most of his stuff but can never maintain enough musical interest to go the distance in what it would demand in physical preparation for a performance. If there are any mandolinist out there with 5 or 6 hours per day to practice and enjoy being challanged, Stauffer will keep you busy. Rocco's Serenade is difficult but much more musically interesting and better written for the mandolin.

P.S. I'd love to see a copy of Victor's Sweelinck Variations.

[vkioulaphides]

As a shameless, committed neoclassicist, I based my Sweelinck Variations on his variations on "Mein junges Leben hat ein End", found in Monumenta Musica Neerlandica. There are countless recordings of the original variations on YouTube, and elsewhere; highly recommended, and historically awesome, as the brainchild of the Father of Us All, when it comes to instrumental variations. Vide the Great JPS' crafty bypass of Calvinist biases against instrumental music in church, and the wonderful music he crafted, despite the authorities...

An inside story, fearing no offense: It was not only Sweelinck's multi-centennial that was coming up at the time that prompted me to write this piece. As I was turning 50, Sebastiaan was turning 30; so I found the poetic theme doubly fitting, as both of us were in a stage where we were looking both ahead, and back, Janus-like, at our artistic lives. I say no more. This is a broader, more general, human experience...

I pay myself no vain compliment when I consider and call this work "monumental". It is, indeed, my magnum opus for the genre, which I will never surpass. It incorporates each and every thing my other, numerous variations for unaccompanied mandolin have featured as a single formative principle: the cross-picking of Diferencias, the chordal writing of Aprés de Bèriot, the four-voice counterpoint of Studio a quattro, the melody-and-accompaniment of Basque Variations, the figuration of Fiorillesco, you name it... everything, "including the kitchen-sink". It takes a towering technique to pull it off. Now, whether the piece itself is any good, that judgment I leave to others.

This score is restricted, and in Sebastiaan's hands exclusively, at least for the time being. Some day, it, too, will be freely circulated— but not for the faint of heart.

Cheers,

Victor

[vkioulaphides]

While neoclassical, I am also shamelessly a-historical. One of my favorite interpretations of the original variations, on modern piano (*gasp!*) is the one I happily share with you all, for your enjoyment:



Please bypass the absolutely IDIOTIC commercial that inevitably pops up before this most sublime of scores...

Cheers,

Victor

[joebrent]

Try this one. Here's the recording.

[margora]

Pleased to see all the suggestions!

To continue the discussion a bit further, here are three works that I personally consider quite difficult although clearly performable:

--Robert Lombardo, "Fantasy Variations #4"

--John Craton, "The Gray Wolf"

and a personal favorite of mine

Yonshinao Kobayashi, "Sonata" for solo mandolin.

Come to think of it, there should be a separate thread for very difficult works for solo mandolin by Japanese composers (e.g. Kuwahara).

[Eugene]

...And speaking of Kuwahara, I've always thought this piece looked kinda challenging (i.e., near impossible): Improvised Poem. I've also seen Annika Hinsche (back when she was Lückebergfeld) perform it at a more manageable but still convincing tempo.

[margora]

Kuwahara's "Improvised Poem" is one of several very difficult pieces published by Trekel as part of the series "Yasuo Kuwahara: The Mandolin Virtuoso"

Another very demand piece that I personally like (and occasionally work on) is David Jaffe's "Ellis Island Sonata".

[Jim Garber]

...And speaking of Kuwahara, I've always thought this piece looked kinda challenging (i.e., near impossible): Improvised Poem. I've also seen Annika Hinsche (back when she was Lückebergfeld) perform it at a more manageable but still convincing tempo.

Phew! some serious shredding on that piece esp in the beginning.

[Plamen Ivanov]

I think Silvio Ranieri's Fantasia Originale (concert piece for mandolin solo) qualifies for that list. Looks extremely difficult to me. I'm not aware of a recent recording of the piece (last 20 years). Richard and Neil could also comment on this one.

Best,
Plamen

[margora]

"I think Silvio Ranieri's Fantasia Originale (concert piece for mandolin solo) qualifies for that list."

While I have many of Ranieri's compositions, the "Fantasia Originale" is not one of them. I would certainly love a copy, assuming it is out of print (certainly) and not under copyright (don't know).

[margora]

Plamen kindly sent me a copy of the Ranieri. Many thanks!

[Jim Garber]

I would also like to know the specifics of what makes each of these pieces near impossible for you ultra-skilled players.

[joebrent]

Improvised Poem isn't really all that hard in a way, because it's actually written very 'mandolinistically'. The trick is that when you're learning it, there's a lot of string crossing that you have to learn as choreography as much as music. If it were a consistent pattern, it wouldn't be very hard at all, but then it always breaks off to something weird. It's also hard to memorize because of the spiky 4-note chords occurring in strange places.

Ranieri's stuff is also written very idiomatically, same with Calace, Munier, Abt, etc. Scales, arpeggios, duo-style, all that stuff is hard, but it's the sort of thing you practice a lot in standard mandolin technique, so if you're good at the exercises and etudes, you'll be ready for the musical applications in the virtuoso repertoire. It's the non-standard stuff that trips you up. Each piece has its own unique challenges. If I'm honest, there are several movements in the Bach Sonatas and Partitas that are harder to play, technically, than anything in the mandolin repertoire, because you have the challenge of the notes themselves as well as trying to apply violin technique to the mandolin in a musical way. Chaconne obviously, but also all of the fugues, especially the C major, are beasts. When I play Bach, I end up using a lot of awkward fingerings to try to eliminate ringing open strings. And there's a lot of stuff that works on violin but not as well on mandolin (and vice-versa, of course), like chords that are designed to be played with two notes covered by one finger. That's always harder on mandolin than it is on violin, so I end up going into half-position a lot. There are also a lot of stretches that are easier on violin than mandolin, unless you have a smaller-scale instrument like an Embergher. Pahkina is way bigger, at 14.25", and wider too, so some of the contrapuntal stuff is easier, but then I run into trouble with the bigger stretches.

Hardest thing I ever played was the piece Fico Tarazona wrote for me, Southern Winds. I'll see if I can upload a copy of the music here --

[Eugene]

I'm a fisheries biologist and play mandolin like one. Generating any music at all is hard.

Kidding aside, I think lengthy four-voice passages, especially those involving moving voices among sustained notes and contortion or awkward stretches, always introduce some difficulty. Anything that requires constant thought and sustained, constant focus to achieve accuracy is rough. I'll stick to fish.

[Jim Garber]

Joe, thanks for more specifics. As to the Bach solos, I have heard from my violin-playing friend that in many cases, even on the violin, std fingering rules don't often apply and half-positions, odd fingerings and extra stretches are often what is needed to make the music.

[joebrent]

Yeah, pretty much Jim, only way more so on mandolin. There's things that are easier on mandolin though -- for instance, on violin, you try to shift on bow changes wherever possible so you don't hear the slide, and that's something the mandolin doesn't have to worry about. For contrapuntal passages, violin also has to roll most chords of more than 2 notes, which to me always sounds unconvincing, and is better on mandolin. But in Bach's music, extraneous ringing open strings can just bedevil you, and you have to do completely different fingerings than violin to compensate for that, so you end up constantly shifting around and in a lot of weird positions. Then there's stuff like beat 3 of the 1st movement of the b minor partita -- that's just impossible on mandolin. So you have to re-arrange the music just a bit to make it more idiomatic. Not as drastically as when guitarists do it, but a little. You can do it without disturbing the voice leading, but there's always that twinge of guilt, like you're painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa or something.

[joebrent]

When I was 16 I was at a summer music academy with a guy named Jason DePue, who's now a violinist in the Philly Orchestra. He was really, really good even then, and I used to hang out outside his practice room and listen to him play Paganini and stuff. One day I asked him what was the hardest thing he'd ever played, and he said the Bach E major concerto, because, "With Paganini, it's so all over the place, but with that piece, if every note isn't perfect, the whole thing falls apart." When I recorded it in 07 with Bridget, it was sort of as a tribute to him. Lesson: difficulty is an ephemeral thing. There's finger and technique difficulty, and then there's musical difficulty, which is WAY harder. There's a reason advancing violin students hardly ever study the Brahms sonatas, because even though they're not all that technically difficult, they're very mature works, and you should work your way through a lot of other technical works (including the concerto) and live life a little bit before you can really understand the sonatas. Mandolin repertoire should definitely be graded that way. Ideally, an advancing student should continue revisiting the Bach Sonatas and Partitas all through their development, while working through Calace, Kuwahara, Ranieri, Munier etc, and the etude books, and only after they've matured a bit should they tackle some of the non-standard solo and chamber repertoire.

Oh, and btw, the hardest chamber piece I've ever seen is Frank Zappa, called The Girl In The Magnesium Dress. I've attached it here, excerpted from my book --