The tone of this Gilbert and Sullivan piece is lighthearted and even informal. It seemed, to me at least, to stand out from the rest of the numbers collected in this text so far. (Though I guess it's a bit close in spirit to Bizet's Toreador Song, and it couldn't actually be more informal than a song adapted from a negro spiritual, even if nowhere near as grave.) Still, I think those are appropriate adjectives, and when I took a look at a couple performances of the comic opera on YouTube, it seems that general atmosphere carried throughout the piece. So I wasn't too far off.
I spent a couple of the practice days just reading my way through the entire song, and either this song is easier to sight read than the others, or my sight reading is improving. (I'm guessing it's the former.) In any case, it wasn't utterly distasteful to read through it and far less painful than usual.
The song's in F major, but spends a bit of time in C major with a time signature change (right) to go with the key change. This is the second time-signature change encountered since I began using this book. The first was in Berceuse. This one seems to be primarily related to the synthetic nature of the piece. J.T. titles it "excerpts from H.M.S. Pinafore" because he sutures three separate songs together to make this medley, songs originally written with different key and time signatures.
The construction works, though; it doesn't seem fractured or even like a medley at all. The picture above also shows an interesting section characterised by arpeggios, tied notes, and hand crossing. Even though the execution turns out to be some pretty straightforward two-handed arpeggio work, figuring that out required some close textual attention, as I kept getting lost in the notation. It involves holding some of the notes in a chord while releasing others, so that I really had to focus on what I was doing to get it right. Turns out that the pedalling simplifies a lot of this though, but this isn't so apparent the first time you look at the text. Notice that E in the bass clef whose stem extends all the way down from the semiquaver group in the treble (pic above-right). I am not entirely clear why it's printed that way, unless it's to reduce the need for excessive ledger lines. I think I'm more aware of that kind of thing today in particular, though, for two reasons. Last night I glanced ahead in my book to Chopin's Prelude in C Minor and noticed he does a similar thing, but when I really took notice was this morning when I took a look at the score for his Raindrop Prelude and saw it was also filled with those transgressive stems. So now I'm seeing them everywhere. At first it was daunting to look at, but after thinking for a while, that's when the simplification idea came to me. Why use ledger lines to duplicate portions of the staves if you don't have to? But... if that is indeed the reason, why not just write the entire group in the bass clef? Perhaps to preserve the connection or flow or the arpeggio between that first low C in the left hand and the final (E-C) dyad in the right? Who knows... but as long as we're on the subject of arpeggios, above-left is another interesting one. Here the stems of all six notes are beamed together, somewhat supporting my earlier hypothesis about preserving connections. 
I dunno if I should be embarrassed to admit that it took me a long time to adapt my fingers to playing this section. (I'm not.) It looks simple enough, but I had to play it scores of times just to get it to feel right under my fingers. Unrelatedly, this is also where the time signature change first takes place, and I remember not really being able to cognise (or perhaps accept) the change when reading through it the first time. I had to re-listen to a recording, but then it became clearer. I'm sure sight-reading jitters were largely responsible for this lapse.
This was another section that took a while to get right. The first two bars actually came easy, but the third and fourth required some work. There's something about the fingering in the left hand that's a tiny bit awkward. The thumb is perched on B flat, while the third finger is buried in that valley between E flat and F sharp. My hands don't take well to finding that position twice in a row, but I don't think it can be avoided. The right hand does an interesting little flourish that, once learned, is pretty fluid. It seems more comfortable with the 4th finger on B flat and fairly frolics in that measure. So, all in all, the passage turned out pretty sweet, but after a bit of work.
I'm still working on playing these acciaccaturas just right. Each seems to require just a simple flick of the 4th finger and then a solid strike with the 3rd, but (alas) I'm still botching it. It'll work itself out though. Fingers crossed... Alan Chan's rendition
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