Fingering

Pianists with “technique to burn” who can easily play the notes as they appear in the score may not find these fingerings useful. They are intended for pianists like myself who need to do whatever they can to make performance easier and more comfortable. You can’t give much pleasure to yourself or your listeners if you’re struggling with an awkward passage, so Step 1 should be to make it less awkward.

Everybody’s hand is different—overall size, relative length of fingers, flexibility/stretch between fingers, to name a few obvious points—and that’s only the visible part. There are differences between our internal mechanisms too—nervous systems etc—that are even more important. So it’s too much to expect that one fingering will suit every hand/nervous system. For the majority of fingerings, the individual pianist will just have to work them out for herself.

But there’s one kind of fingering that may have a more universal application, namely redistributing the notes between the hands. This is the kind of fingering that I am going to begin with. If you just move one or two notes between the hands (as I do all the time), it normally won’t cause a problem when you pencil it in the score, but if you start moving notes around wholesale, it can get hard to read, so it may be nice to have a completely rewritten score. (I ask your understanding for crudities in the score caused by my inability to master the notation software.)

I suggest you start by downloading the Ravel Prelude from IMSLP and working out the fingering yourself before looking at my fingering. Occasionally I go beyond redistributing and actually rewrite a few notes, so it’s probably a good idea to always start by fingering the original score, for comparison.