Best Fingering for Ondine

Question

So I've clearly lost my sanity and all sense of self-preservation and decided that I want to tackle Ondine by Ravel from Gaspard de la Nuit. If you know, you know. If you don't know, THIS:

So I actually managed to get somewhat passably through the first page and a half of this monster of the piano repertoire (basically ten more bars of the nonsense above) and am confronted with.... THIS:

Yeah.

Needless to say, I'm a bit intimidated. But Mama didn't raise no quitter, so onwards and upwards (or maybe downwards. Into the water. To be drowned by an angry mermaid), let's do some slow practice, hands apart.

Only problem is that the editor provide pretty minimal guidance as far as fingerings are concerned. So I've come up with what feels natural and it looks more or less like this:

However, I have concerns about whether that's going to work when I (a) bring it up to tempo and (2) add in the left hand, which overlaps heavily with the right hand, because of course it does. If you've played this piece, can you comment on what works here?

Also, any advice on how to deal with the hand crossing when I bring the hands together? Because some of the bits seem like they require right hand over left (the B naturals in the LH) and the other bits seem like they require the opposite (black keys in the LH).

Answer 1

Given fingering

Your fingering seems fine. It preserves logical groupings.

My preferences

I prefer a slightly different one, but this is more "to taste", I think, that it is necessarily "better".

• Rather than beginning 1-4 5 1-5, I prefer 1-2 3 1-2, because I find it easier to get to from the preceding chord, and it's more comfortable for my hand.

• Then, when dropping to the lower octave, rather than 1 5 1-4, I use 1 3 1-2, for the same reasons: easier for me to get to and more comfortable.

• Returning to the central octave, I use 2-4 5 1-3 1 (vs. 1-4 5 1-4 2). The rest is the same as yours.

Here's an illustration with my fingerings in circled numbers.

Hand crossing

As far as the hand crossing, I always cross left over right, and the key for me is to play the roll quickly with the second note staccato so that my left hand is out of the way of the right well before it needs to make the octave shift. Also, of course, keep the right hand/wrist/arm as low/flat as possible.

Demonstration

Valentina Lisitsa has a video that demonstrates the technique very nicely. And the recording is clean enough that it plays well even when slowed down.