Ok, I’m not sure if September Song is the hardest, but of all the Ffrench pieces I’ve played, it’s definitely the hardest in that group. And imo it’s much harder than Miracles.
I think it’s hard for (at least) three reasons. No, wait, four.
1) The inner voices mean you have to distribute notes across the two hands, IOW some parts which are written in the bass clef need to played with the RH, or some parts written in the treble clef need to be played with the LH, and that makes it hard to sightread or read play. So a big task in the initial stages was to go through and figure out when to take something in the LH vs. RH.
2) There are some polyrhythms, which is sort of challenging on its own, it they seem to co-occur with wonky fingering, which doubles the difficulty. And the polyrhythms shift/have a variations across the piece, which makes it hard to internalize the rhythm.
3) Ffrench himself has not released the score for this, so all I have is a transcription, and the pianist who wrote it needed an editor. For example, there are some repeating patterns, and in one part of the score she notates it one way (say, some notes are written in the bass clef) but in another part of the score, the same pattern is notated differently (those same notes are written in the treble clef). A good editor could go through and make all those consistent, which would make it easier to read/sightread.
4) Some of the repeating patterns have very, very subtle variations each time they occur
But I think the biggest challenge for me thing is the polyrhythms, which co-occur with the shifting variations in the those polyrhythms and the wonky fingering needed. (I think Ffrench has very large hands)
Let me grab some examples….
