Tips on Widor No. 6 Allegro?

Dear all,

Maybe someone has a kind of miraculous tip for the following problem: I'm practicing Widor's 6th symphony, 1st movement, and it works quite well ... except ...

When harmony changes to f#m with increased pedal movement, this is still ok. But shortly after that, the combination of 1/8 in pedal, 1/4 right hand and 1/12 left hand kills me

One page later I can go on.

The problem is quite obvious the combination of left hand and pedal. How are professionals tackling this problem? Practicing by drumming the rhythm on the table also did not work yet

First of all: use a metronome and start with a very slow tempo, so slow that you find it too easy and boring.
In this method, play only two parts simultaneously: the 2 hands without pedal, right hand with pedal, left hand with pedal. When you put all the 3 parts together, practice little sections and memorize them. Every day, try one step higher with your metronome, never more. It's a question of patience too.
Good luck.

Yes, this is how I practice the "hard" parts in general. At this point, since the rhythm is the problem, it is somehow even harder at low tempi

These measures were very painful to learn for me too. I began by learning each part separately until each one was fluent a bit faster than the final tempo. Then, I did as Ludu says : it was very long, but it worked. Hauptwerk's MIDI recording replayed at a very slow tempo can be useful to control from time to time that "all was well together". Good work : it's worth it !

I too remember when I learned that passage that it was the most difficult part of the work. Practicing at slow tempo is definitely a good idea, although it has made it somewhat difficult for me when the tempo was really very slow.

What I did was to learn each part separately, then practice right hand and pedals. If found that (being right-handed myself) the pedals and right hand was the "support" for this complex passage. Once you can play that in performance tempo, then you can take the tempo down a notch and practice only left hand and pedals. By that time you will be well familiar with the pedal part and you can concentrate more on the left hand. Once you can get the left hand and pedals up to performance tempo, you have basically won the challenge. Add the right hand to the mix at slightly lower tempo and you will quickly get everything right.

The key thing for me here was to properly learn the "support" (right hand and pedals) and gradually adding the left hand. Also, at very slow tempo it really became a bit difficult for me to play the left hand and pedals due to the "over-focusing" on the rhythm. If your "support" is steady enough, you can easily add the triplets in the left hand without too much trouble.

Good luck in learning this amazing work! Once you get through it, it is one of the most enjoyable pieces to play! Enjoy!

When drilling it slowly, it also helps to divide the 2 against 3 beat into 6 equal steps: If you count the triplets as "one and two and three and", the second note of the two note part falls on the second "and" halfway between the second and third triplet. Very tedious at first, but if you learn to count it, speeding it up without letting one part run ahead of the others is a little easier. Add this to the other techniques discussed above, they're all useful. The notes play on the syllables "one two and three".

Yes, those two pages are tricky, but you have gotten some excellent advice on how to conquer them. To prevent difficult places like this from slipping away from me, I photocopy these sections and keep them in a "roadblock file". Every few days I play slowly through some of my file. This keeps those hard places in my fingers, and makes it much easier to work the entire piece up when I want to play it.

-Jerry

I'm coming sort of late into this, but here is my 2.5 cents worth of thought. Really slow practice on these kinds of passages is counter productive I find. Also, I don't think counting 16th note sextuplets is useful. Poly-rhythms will happen when each part can just flow on automatic pilot and you can feel it like a dance step. Practice each part separately as slow as necessary to get going, but get up to tempo separately until it is almost memorized in MUSCLE memory. Now, when putting the two hard parts together (in this case the eighth note triplets against the straight eighth notes) do so as close to tempo as possible BUT leave out the troublesome notes, in this case, every other eighth in the pedal. Just play the eighths that fall on the beat (no poly-rhythm to worry about) When you can do this at tempo, add back in the missing eighths and the muscle memory in your legs should take over and make it happen on automatic pilot. If you have spent too long practicing too slow, the muscle memory won't be right. That is why I would recommend one part part at a time, getting up to tempo as soon as possible. You don't want to spend too much time training your muscles to do it at a speed that is not ever going to be used. Another trick is to vary the rhythm so different fingers have to do their thing at slightly different speeds. It will give you more control in the long run in difficult passage work. In this case, when you are practicing the triplet line by itself, turn it into a 8th and two 16ths, then two 16ths and an 8th and then keep the triplet pattern, but dot the first 8th and turn the second into a 16th. After you've played it all these ways, I think you will be surprised to find how easy it is to play it as written.
And my biggest trick of all that I preach all the time, PRACTICE BACKWARDS. by which I mean, start with the last measure or two you are working on and add previous measures. That way when you want to keep going, you're going through notes you have already learned.