Top 10 Hardest Paganini Pieces for the Violin

Happy Thanksgiving! Not that Paganini and Thanksgiving have much to do with each other; his connotations with the Devil and his birthdate of October 27 peg him as more of a Halloween kind of guy, but nevertheless I'm giving Paganini the spotlight right now.

Paganini essentially invented virtuoso playing—not that there wasn't any virtuoso playing before Paganini, but Paganini expanded the technique toolbox into a toolshed. He was highly influenced by Locatelli and Duranowski, neither of which are well-recorded today, but they lay the foundation for Paganini's rocketlike ascension to virtuoso glory.

Among Paganini's most difficult technical stumbling blocks include extended left-hand pizzicato passages, extended artificial harmonic passages, extended tremolo passages, and extensive use of double, triple, and even quadruple stops. Musically, Paganini was not as adventurous as his pianistic counterpart Liszt would become. His large-scale writing (in concertos, sonatas, etc.) stay firmly within Classical tradition and his orchestral writing can even be said to be dull in parts. However, it is his downright miraculous expansion of violin technique that continues to wow listeners today.

10. Caprice No.1
0:00 Itzhak Perlman
0:19 Leonidas Kavakos

9. Carnival of Venice
0:49 Stefan Milenkovich
1:20 Salvatore Accardo

8. Caprice No.6
1:52 Tibor Kováč

7. Violin Concerto No.2
2:35 Yehudi Menuhin
3:19 Ruggiero Ricci

6. Caprice No.8
4:23 Ilya Gringolts

5. Variations on "I palpiti"
5:06 Roman Kim
6:14 Roman Kim

4. Caprice No.4
6:51 Ilya Gringolts

3. Violin Concerto No.1
7:32 Leonid Kogan
8:15 Hilary Hahn

2. Variations on "Nel cor più non mi sento"
9:05 Dmitri Makhtin
9:40 Yehudi Menuhin

1. Variations on "God Save the King"
10:18 Roman Kim
11:08 Roman Kim

Honorable mentions: Le Streghe, Violin Concerto No.3, Violin Concerto No.4, Moses Fantasy

[GICM]

the thing about difficult violin pieces vs difficult piano pieces is that with difficult piano pieces you may be able to withstand listening to a whole piece in a bad performance if you can somewhat tolerate the wrong notes, but with difficult violin pieces there's only so much screeching that you can listen to before it starts killing you from the inside

[enyusnewworld]

‘I paid for the whole Stradivari, I use the whole Stradivari’ — Niccolo Paganini

[blabla]

Kim‘s technic truly is staggering. I was actually wondering how you‘d rank his new transcription of Beethoven‘s 5th in your Top 100 violin pieces.

[perfumeil]

damn, it’s hard to imagine someone playing these just listening to the audio

[Johnadams]

paganini is the king of insanely difficult violin music. i think he must have been clinically insane, but with the talent to do it

[Dodecatone]

Me waiting for all the TwoSet folks to find this video

[mrsisbellspanish]

Enjoyed the video I’ll look into playing those some day,
Linda’s grandson, Austin

[fredericchopin]

I can see why such works of utmost dexterity and unmatchable technique had such an effect on Liszt as to completely transform his style of compositions and write the Transcendental and Paganini Études for the piano.

[PianoSpeaks]

My favorite YouTuber uploaded YES!!! Could we have one of these for Medtner or Albeniz? (Or Ginastera)

[brightmacsworld]

A this is definitely my wake-up music wow this is really hard

[onLYviolin]

About the great version of the Paganini No.4 Caprices, I recommend Tianwa Yang' s playing. She recorded WHOLE 24 caprices when she was 13.

[teddo]

Thanks! Always wanted to see which caprices were ACTUALLY the hardest. Mozart most difficult solo piano? Would be interesting to see

[pulsar]

"revised" diff scale:
1 New player: Andante in C - Elgar
2 Early Beginner: Minuet in G - Petzold/Suzuki
3 Early Intermediate: Ave Maria - Gounod
4 Late Intermediate: Salut D'amour - Elgar
5 Early Advanced: Czardas - Monti
6 Advanced: The Lark Ascending - Williams
7 Professional: Debussy Violin Sonata
8 Professional+: Carmen Fantasy - Sarasate
9 Virtuoso: I Palpiti - Paganini or Schönberg Phantasy
10 Virtuoso+: Any violin concerto harder than Shostakovich.

#10 Caprice 1: 8+
#9 Carnival of Venice: 8+
#8 Caprice 6: 8+
#7 Violin Concerto #2: 10?
#6 Caprice 8: 8+++
#5 I Palpiti: 9
#4 Caprice 4: 9
#3 Violin Concerto: 10?
#2 Nel Cor Piu Non Mi Sento: 9+
#1 Variations on God Save the Queen: 9++

[GICM]

you know what i bet if Paganini didn't write attractive melodies the general public at least would've shoved him aside just like Czerny even with all that virtuosity

[Musicrafter]

5:06 Roman is definitely not playing what is written. To those in the know, the sound of him employing his trademark forced harmonics technique is quite clear! Some notes are simply far too bright to have been played on the G and D strings as notated.

He uses this to deliver some nice tricks: notice at 6:01 he is actually playing an octave *lower* than written! These notes simply do not exist on the instrument in conventionally accessible artificial harmonics. Consider the very first note: a double stop between a C5 and an E5. The E exists conventionally -- it can be played as the third partial of the lowest A on the instrument (a perfect twelfth above the fundamental), requiring only a hand span of a perfect fifth, a mild stretch which is directly called for elsewhere in the score anyway. But the only way to produce the C is to play it as the second partial of the lowest C on the instrument (a perfect octave above the fundamental) -- but not even Roman can realistically make his hand span an entire octave, I am sure, and to add insult to injury, both of these notes must be played on the G string, which means that without Roman's technique, the double stop called for would be clearly unplayable.

Additionally, notice that in the ensuing arpeggio in the following bar at 6:05, he plays the pitch F4 instead of what is written (sounding F5, a perfect twelfth above the lowest B-flat on the instrument) as a standard note "sul tasto" instead of a harmonic, followed by the pitch A4, which he is clearly fingering as a forced harmonic on the lowest A on the instrument, as evidenced by its slight failure to speak properly revealing the fundamental tone (which is A3). Transitioning on the fly between regular notes and forced harmonics is very hard, so I obviously forgive him for his slight inaccuracy, as his harmonics technique is absolutely stellar, far better than mine. But he is clearly doing this because he wishes to preserve the shape of the arpeggio even an octave lower. And while the harmonic sounding as A4 again does not conventionally exist on the instrument (it only exists as the second partial above A3, which would demand an impossible octave-wide hand span), there is not even any forced harmonic sounding as F4, so he is forced to play it conventionally and try to just blend the tone to mask it.

Further, notice Roman seems to be glissing up to the G he lands on in the next bar at 6:08. Of course that makes sense if the note you just played was fingered as the forced harmonic on A3 in first position and he then had to slide up to fourth position, in order to play the pitch G4 in the only way that is possible (as the second partial of the open G string). Naturally, this could be easily hidden, but he chooses to emphasize it for effect. As written, sounding one octave higher, the player is only asked to make small changes in position, and for the last three notes they may remain entirely in third, so a glissando would be uncalled for an unexplained there.

[chrisingres]

4 isn't the hardest, I'd say, it's ok, 6 is a matter of good condition :D yes, difficult; 1 is a problem of stretching > also difficult. THX for sharing!

[bedwarspepe]

The violin is screaming in pain after I accidently gave it to satan while playing this😊

[imdarealani]

Can you do a scale of Popper's hardest cello works?

[mazeppa]

3:18 - 3:31 .. I swear I've heard something like this in Liszt's Reminiscences de La Juive.
It sounds so similar to that.

[tungholau]

Top 10 Prokofiev hardest piano pieces please.