Practicing Challenges

Many times, we take on a lot of material to learn and master, sometimes an overwhelming amount. The Four Elements System, together with careful planning, is key to facing such a challenge.

This season, 2026–27, I have taken on two major challenges. I have committed to performing Sarasate's Carmen Fantasy, a piece I learned in my twenties and have avoided playing ever since, for good reason... and the Sibelius Concerto, a piece I often teach but last performed in my thirties, twenty years ago.

When trying to learn several pieces at once, there is a temptation to practice all of them, doing a little bit of everything. I find this method both time consuming and inefficient. It is much better to focus on shorter "chunks" of the music and bring them quickly to a high level than to try to get everything done at once.

I gave myself six weeks to prepare Carmen Fantasy and began practicing it three weeks ago. With an average of two hours of practice a day, I spent the first several days focusing almost entirely on the first three pages, using the 4ES method. I practiced every small snippet of music at the right tempo, with the right sound and character, aiming for performance level from the beginning.

By day four, I had enough time to begin moving further into the piece. I decided to tackle the hardest sections first. Well, all of Carmen Fantasy is difficult, but there are still recognizable degrees of hardship.

I worked out the fingerings and bowings and marked alternative options in a different color on the page or screen. I explored the remaining material mostly at slower tempos, without yet trying to bring all of it to performance level.

By the end of the first week, the beginning was quite solid, and I could start working seriously on the rest of the piece. Each day, I concentrated on a different section, or several sections, bringing those closer to performance level while playing through the rest slowly, mainly for intonation and familiarity.

By the end of the second week, I could get through the entire piece, work wise, in somewhere between an hour and ninety minutes. In about two weeks, I will begin rehearsing it with piano, and two weeks after that I will perform Carmen Fantasy for the first time.

With my "spare" practice time, usually thirty to fifty minutes, I began going through the Sibelius Concerto. I decided to rethink and redo all my fingerings and bowings rather than simply fall back on what I had used twenty years ago. Again, I started with the first half page, practiced it to performance level, and only then began moving forward.

So now, in week three or four of the process, I have enough time in a normal practice session to go through most, if not all, of Carmen Fantasy and also work seriously on the first movement of the Sibelius.

Obviously, I have other pieces to play as well. The Carmen Fantasy concert also includes Tzigane, Brahms's First Sonata, and a Kreisler piece. But since I have performed those works extensively, I am confident that I can bring them back to performance level relatively quickly and much closer to the concert date.

The important point is that not everything needs the same amount of attention at the same time.

When the amount of music in front of you feels overwhelming, don't divide your time equally between all of it. Decide what needs the most work, break it into manageable sections, and bring those sections to performance level one by one.

The mountain becomes much smaller when you stop trying to climb every side of it at once.