The bulk of the Liszt sonata is now (sort of) back in my fingers, but I’m facing a bit of a problem with available time.

If I’m lucky I manage to spend about an hour practising per day. This, clearly, is not enough to maintain a healthy repertoire, or to conquer a piece like the Liszt, so I’m breaking it down into manageable sections that can all be beaten into submission separately. Once they’re all subdued I shall try and stitch them together.

I’ve currently two main points of attack. The fugato section, about which I previously had a bit of a mental block, has proved to be straightforward to play, but easy for my fingers to forget, so there has been a lot of repetition of that around these parts. The prestissimo octaves towards the end of the piece have proved less daunting than I feared although it’s taken weeks of slow practise to get them to a respectable speed. I’m still not sure that they’re really coming out at a proper prestissimo – more of a panicky allegro moderato, I suspect… but still, they’re coming along quite nicely.

However, while I’ve been focusing on these bits so narrowly, I’ve found other sections that I’ve resurrected go back to rack and ruin. I think I need to organise my practise better so that I spend at least some time reminding my fingers how the whole thing goes.

I’d be very interested to know how other amateur players with limited time manage the challenges of learning larger works.