Me on Guitar Again

After I found (and was so impressed by) the videos of Kazuhito Yamashita playing Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" on classical guitar, I was inspired to buy the sheet music of Yamashita's transcription. Some of it is just incredibly difficult -- the most technically challenging music I've ever seen.

I've been working up one little movement -- "The Tuileries" -- and can play it passably well, I think. It's still pretty hard; nothing about it is very idiomatic on the guitar. Lots of fast right-hand scales that are hard to pull off cleanly (e.g., at 8-10 seconds, or at 59 seconds). Lots of left-hand shifts that are devilishly hard (e.g., 27-28 seconds, 37-38 seconds, and 1:03-1:06). Then there are effects that are very difficult for both the right and left hand. At 33-34 seconds there's a difficult left hand passage that has two right-hand harmonics that Yamashita throws in, apparently just to make it harder. The arpeggiated chord at 40 seconds is very, very difficult. It's a very awkward left-hand position in and of itself; the left-hand shifts to and from that position make it harder to do without buzzing; and then the backwards arpeggio is very hard for the right hand to perform cleanly and with a light sound.