Massenet again, and not a moment too soon! I took a light look at
this song yesterday, and I think it won't be too hard to learn. It's got
a sonatina flavour. So far, I haven't played very many sonatinas—only
two by Clementi, and just the first movements (more or less). I like Aragonaise better
than your average sonatina, though, and I'm looking forward to doing
some "close finger action." That's a term J.T. uses, and at first it
perplexed me, but I soon figured out that it means keeping your fingers
close enough to the keys to execute some fast runs.
...
Two
weeks after making that bold statement, I'm now five-days post learning
the song completely. While I was right—it wasn't that hard to
learn—there were a couple days in there when I was a bit confused about
which parts fit where, because this was another one of those songs in
which each part is a variation on another. Easy to learn; easy to become
disoriented. I've been challenging myself to do it fast now that I've learned all the notes because I think that I perhaps don't push myself enough in that area when it comes to playing fast in actual songs. I pretty much only play fast in C Major scales. Not a good track record. 
The close finger action is alright. I find that while I can do it, my fingers are still prone to spastic movements than demonstrate the extent to which they still require disciplining.
Their shortcomings are especially evident at these parts of the text
where I'm required to repeat a fast 4-3-2-1 pattern in the right hand (See above and to the left).
I'm used to going from the thumb straight back to the 5th and not the
4th finger, so the poor 4th is experiencing a lot of pressure right now,
and its first reaction is of course to buckle. The pic to the left is the hardest to play because the 4th finger is up on F# and the hand is angled in a way that forces the fingers to move a little sideways while doing the run. Getting there, though.
This part is fun to hear. It requires the tiniest leap from E up to B, but then the short chromatic that goes 5-4-5 in the pic you'll see I've changed to 5-4-4. I just slide the 4th finger down onto the A and it works great because the left hand's doing it's thing with the 4th finger at that moment too. I naturally had some trouble with that leap at first until I realized I could just stretch the pinky down there and it was all good. The left hand pivot from that F to the A-D# dyad was a little more tricky. The hard part was landing the D# and not slipping off onto some adjacent white key.
Then we have the strident chord passage, which I like a lot. The pedal is very important to making it not seem choppy and allowing you to move your hands as quickly as you need to in order to get to each new chord. I neglected to play it with pedal at first because I didn't realize how helpful pedals can be in chorded situations. I thought they were unnecessary—I know, did I learn nothing from Chopin's Prelude in C Minor?? 
Here's another one of those chromatiques. There are a bunch of those short passages in this song, and I took pictures of all of them, but maybe that was overdoing it. 
Here's a hand-over-hand passage that follows the B-A-G-F# runs in the right hand. Those runs also require an angling of the hand that I'm still working on. They go directly into a progression of about four such runs down the keyboard to end up on the same E the song started out on. This brings on a repetition of the opening theme leading up to the grand finale. 
So... the grand finale involves a variation on the strident passage and then a run that extends far beyond the usual four repeated descending notes. I found it astonishing and cool that it we pedal through a half scale. (See centre of picture left.) I also didn't realize pedaling could be euphonious outside of chorded situations. But of course it worked beautifully and now I look forward to hearing it whenever I play. Have to be careful to play that F-A at the end correctly and not sneak a G in there, as my fingers are wont to do. 
The song ends with a sextuple (six-pack?) of those four-note runs, half of which is pictured right. It ends with a dot: B in staccato. Then a single key striking out the rhythm of those strident chords, and finally a G chord in staccato shared between the hands. See pic below. I like the way the strident note is pedalled, but I have to make sure to lift it in time to strike that last chord or the staccato won't sound. There's more practice doing that fast pedal-to-staccato transition in the song that follows—Petite Russian Rhapsodie—which I'm already almost finished memorising because I'm so woefully behind in this blog. But at least the practice isn't flagging! :)
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