ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 14 JANUARY 2013
How hard is the G Minor Ballade? A few commenters on the Guardian website took issue with the assertion that it’s “one of the hardest pieces in the repertoire.” Actually those words weren’t mine – they were Murray Perahia’s. Most of the professional pianists I spoke to confessed they found it extremely challenging. Baremboim used the word "slippery". Emanuel Ax said he'd never played a clean performance of the notorious coda. Ronan O'Hora said “you could line up a lot of concert pianists and ask them which is the piece they would least like to play cold before an audience or on camera, and an awful lot of them would say the G minor Ballade."
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