Sandro Nebieridze feels intense tension through his body. The 21-year-old Georgian stands behind the stage in the Store Studio at news, ready to play the world’s most difficult piano concerto*. Despite his young age, Nebieridze has won a number of awards, and played on major concert stages all over the world. Most of the pieces have been easy to learn – he certainly has an ear, and spends a short time getting the notes under his skin. But “Rach 3”, which he will try out on this April evening, is no ordinary piano piece. During the next 45 minutes, he will play 30,000 notes on the piano (an average of approx. 11 notes per second). Can he outthink everyone? No, he can’t think about that now; out in the hall, we in the audience have already started clapping him onto the stage. *World’s most difficult? Yes, there are several piano concertos that are considered very difficult. For example Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto and Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. But when it comes to the pieces within the “standard repertoire” for classical music, i.e. the most well-known pieces that almost all active pianists know, “Rach 3” is often described as the world’s most difficult. Rachmaninov’s bear paws In the summer of 1909, Sergej Rachmaninov sat in his country town in Russia. He was already a major composer in his home country, and had achieved success with his second piano concerto a few years earlier. Now he had been invited to tour in the independent United States, and needed something new in the repertoire, something grand, “grand” and magnificent that could blow the Americans away. It is unknown whether Rachmaninov was familiar with the phrase “Everything is big in America”, but it may at least seem that way from the result. GARDEN WORK: 36-year-old Sergej Rachmaninov sits and composes his third piano concerto in the country town of Ivanovka, 46 miles southeast of Moscow. The concert grew bigger and bigger, and he barely had time to finish the composition before he got on the American boat. He thus had to learn to play the piece on a mini piano in rough seas over the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving in the USA, Rachmaninov played his fresh concerto together with the New York Symphony Orchestra. The audience was ecstatic and wanted him to play one more time. The critics, on the other hand, thought that the concert was perhaps a bit long? 30,000 tons in 45 minutes was probably a bit much to digest. (Most piano concerts last around half an hour.) At first there were hardly any other pianists who dared to play the concert. It was speculated whether one might need extra large hands to play the piece. Rachmaninov, who was one of the world’s best pianists, had two giant Russian bear paws. RANGE: Rachmaninov had a finger span of almost 30 cm, and could cover twelve white keys when he played. For pianists with more normal-sized hands, it can be demanding enough to cover an octave on eight white keys. Sandro Nebieridze does not have particularly large hands. In Store Studio, he has started playing “Rach 3” together with conductor Petr Popelka and the rest of the musicians in the Broadcasting Orchestra. The first minute is calm, melodious and very simple. Nebieridze looks relaxed; at one point he adjusts his glasses with one hand while playing on with the other. But he knows very well that this is only the calm before the storm. The difficult parts come one after the other – and have caused many an experienced orchestral pianist to lose their composure. Mental breakdown When the Australian David Helfgott tried to master “Rach 3” as a young student in the 1960s, he became seriously mentally ill. The pianist was never the same again. The pianist became known to the whole world when the film “Shine” was released in 1996. The Oscar-winning drama tells the story of Helfgott’s life, and his intense battle against “Rach 3. “SHINE”: Skodesplayer Geoffrey Rush won the Oscar for best male lead after the interpretation by the Australian pianist David Helfgott. Photo: HO / AP In movie theaters all over the world, young pianists were shaken to the core. One of these was 13-year-old Christian Ihle Hadland from Stavanger. – I saw the film seven times in the cinema. Last time I sat all alone in the smallest hall with 20 seats. When I came out, I was completely bewitched. 13-year-old Christian, who was already a very promising piano talent, went home to practice. Part of the moral of “Shine” is that you absolutely shouldn’t try “Rach 3” at a young age, at worst you can go crazy and end up in a psychiatric institution. But Christian still took the chance. RACH FAN: Few concerts have influenced Christian Ihle Hadland more strongly than “Rach 3”. According to the renowned pianist, he has never had such an intense relationship with any other piece. Photo: Javier Auris / news – I got the sheet music and started practicing what I could learn. Then there were some games that were simply not possible for me to play at the time. Christian Ihle Hadland grew up to become one of Norway’s best pianists. He played on big stages at home and abroad, and had “Rach 3” as his trusty companion all the time. It was this piece that he constantly strummed in his free time, or hummed to himself. In 2016, the Broadcasting Orchestra asked him if he could imagine performing the infamous concert. Hadland, who had now turned 32 years old, agreed immediately. He could already know the whole play by heart. That is to say, he could almost complete the play by heart. There was still one game left that he had never been able to play before. The “impossible” part It is not unusual for composers to include various “brife parts” in their pieces, i.e. passages that sound extra difficult to the audience. But according to Hadland, this is often just cheating and fantasy. – Tchaikovsky, Liszt and Beethoven were all showmen. They liked to put in such cheating games that sound very difficult, but which actually lie incredibly well in their hands, he explains. “Rach 3” has no such cheats. On the other hand, the piece has one passage in particular which both sounds very demanding, and which in addition is actually very demanding. This part is called “the cadence”, and comes approx. eleven minutes into the play. Here the pianist must play completely alone, without help from the orchestra. In the video below, Christian Ihle Hadland visited news to play through the part on “Beat for Beat”‘s digital grand piano: “CADENCE”: When the notes are close to each other, it is much easier for the pianist to maintain a high tempo. In this part, the tones rain over the entire piano almost simultaneously. In the video, the tones are added visually afterwards using software. Hadland only practiced this short part for several weeks before he felt ready to perform the concert with the Broadcasting Orchestra in 2016. Part of what makes this cadenza extra difficult is that you almost only use the white keys. For an amateur pianist, this sounds just delicious, but for a professional orchestral pianist, it can be absolutely terrible. – It is much easier to find your way around the piano when you can jump between white and black keys. BERRE KVITE KEY: An F chord with eight notes from the cadence. When it also goes incredibly fast, and you have to play four keys at a time on each hand, it’s no wonder that the pianists play until they sweat. – You also have to mobilize an enormous force; you actually want another pianist to sit next to you and double all the notes. Strong hands are therefore a prerequisite for being able to master “Rach 3”, but do they have to be gigantic? – No, Hadland assures. Rachmaninov certainly had enormous hands, but he wrote all the pieces for people with normal limbs. Back in Store Studio, Sandro Nebieridze has played for eleven minutes. This means that the 21-year-old has arrived at the big cadence. The rest of the orchestra stops playing, the audience holds its breath, now it’s either going to blow or blow. Has it clicked for Nebieridze? Rachmaninov wrote two different versions of the cadenza: a difficult version, and a very difficult version. Sandro Nebieridze naturally goes for the more difficult version, known as the “Ossia cadence”. He throws himself into a cascade of chords. But what is happening? Nebieridze varies greatly in tempo, and plays certain passages extremely quickly. His hands fly seemingly freely over the keyboard, and he misses several keys. Has it clicked completely for the young pianist? – I probably have a rather unorthodox approach to this play. There are not many people who interpret it in the same way as me, Nebieridze explains after the rousing concert. For the Georgian, it was no defeat that he was unable to play the concert completely technically perfect, after all, it is “Rach 3” we are talking about here. – Show me one person in the whole world who manages to perform the entire concert without playing a single wrong note, he says. Nebieridze would rather remind us that even though the play is an enormously demanding challenge, it is not primarily a giant mountain that one should try to climb. At the end of the day, all music is about communicating feelings, and on this particular evening the pianist felt particularly keen on a specific feeling: freedom. Sandro’s piano playing certainly touched something in the audience this spring evening. After the last note, we cheered as a group, and clapped until the palms almost got chafing. See the entire concert with Sandro Nebieridze and the Broadcasting Orchestra here: Hungry for more “Rach 3”? Then you’ll probably enjoy these clips: THE START OF THE THIRD MOVEMENT: According to Christian Ihle Hadland, this part also contributes to making “Rach 3” very demanding. – The end of the second movement is calm, then the start of the third movement begins with extremely aggressive playing. There is suddenly a pile of sheet music, and you get little help from the orchestra. Just such transitions between different ways of playing can be very difficult, explains Hadland. THE HISTORIC CONCERT: This was the performance that got Sandro Nebieridze really interested in “Rach 3”. The year is 1958, and the 23-year-old American pianist Van Cliburn had been invited to the Soviet Union to participate in a piano competition. In front of a packed concert hall in Moscow, he played “Rach 3”, to a standing ovation from the audience for a full eight minutes. The jury had to ask the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev if they were allowed to choose an American winner, in the middle of the Cold War. “Was he the best?” asked Khrushchev, “Yes!” answer the jury. “Then give him the prize!” THE PIONEER: The Russian pianist Vladimir Horowitz has received much credit for making “Rach 3” one of the world’s most popular piano concerts. He performed the concerto on large stages, and the composer himself thought that Horowitz played him better than anyone else. In 1978, he performed the concert for the last time, aged 75. – He stumbles again and again, and plays so many mistakes, But I feel that precisely all these imperfect parts help to make the concert human. And when a really beautiful part suddenly opens up, I just want to cry. This concert has so much kindness, says Sandro Nebieridze. Recommended further reading:
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The world’s most difficult piano piece – Culture
