With Alternate Hands
Piano solo
In brief

This piece has a wry, caustic character, switching between crisp detached passages and more muffled interjections that feel like a playful dialogue between the hands. The technical demands are modest but specific: Pédale una corda (2.5/5) requires shifting the hand toward the una corda to soften the tone and careful pedalling release to obtain a muted color without losing clarity, and Indépendance des mains (2.5/5) requires maintaining contrasting articulations and dynamics between the hands, so precise arm and finger control is needed to keep the secondary voice from being covered. The work belongs to Bartók’s piano output but its exact period is listed as unknown, though it bears the rhythmic and coloristic traits of his piano writing.

MusicCoach difficulty
18/100
Beginner
Likely range : 2–34/100
Confidence : 57% · fair confidence
BeginnerIntermediateAdvancedVirtuoso
Exam grade
About grade 1 to 2

Estimated from our difficulty score, not taken from an exam syllabus. Checked against 333 works on the ABRSM syllabus: the exact grade is right 7 times out of 10, and within one grade 99 times out of 100.

Difficulty estimate by MusicCoach on a scale of 1 to 100.

Where this work sits
050100

Most works cluster between 45 and 65: a small score gap often marks a real step. The highlighted bar shows this work among those for the same instrument.

The MusicCoach difficulty measures a work's overall demands (technique, reading, stamina) on a shared 0-100 scale, consolidated from editorial and pedagogical reference points (Henle, exam syllabuses, curation) and our own analyses. It measures neither musical value nor the practice time YOU will need: two musicians of the same level can experience the same work very differently depending on their strengths (hands used to octaves, quick sight-reading…). The confidence reflects how many reference points sit behind the score and how well they agree — a lightly documented score is flagged “to validate”. For a truly personal bearing, the diagnostic and your space compare each work to YOUR estimated level, which the score alone cannot do.

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Difficulty sources
Henle Verlag
1
10/100 normalised · 2 obs.
Relative difficulty
11%
Among Béla Bartók
8%
Era
Genre
Estimated skills
Technique
Hand independence
1
Pedaling
Una corda pedal
1
What to play next?

Each suggestion combines difficulty gap, risk, confidence and skill overlap. The first two cards in each column are the most useful pedagogically.

See the whole progression