Ravel: Tombeau de Couperin, Prelude

I chose pictures about perpetual motion machines for this piece because it never stops for one second from the beginning to the end. Ironically the piece as I played it should sound simply relaxing and pleasant without revealing any of the technical difficulties. But perpetual motion pieces are extremely difficult to play because there is no place to stop. Even practicing them is difficult because it is hard to divide them up into sections. This prelude was actually a nightmare for me to learn involving about two weeks of careful study and practice. When I finished it I was so tired that I barely wanted to hear it again and needed a rest. However, seven or eight months have now passed and I now like my result. Ravel was known to have been a weak pianist, unable to play his own music, and he was also not a good conductor. He was a musical genius who wrote awkward piano music. All this is hard to understand because he was a genius orchestrator who understood the instruments he wrote for about as