This song is a little bit fun to play and a little bit hard, too. The middle gets to be fast once you really get to know it, so I have already been trying to drum the notes into my fingers so I can start working on my speed. The hardest part for me seems to be the slow opening (top left), which is also repeated at the end. I find that strange, but I also wonder if I practise the other parts a bit more (for the reasons I gave above) and therefore just haven't put enough time into learning the slower section(s). The challenge of this portion is the arpeggios. I need to focus a bit before I can pull them off, and I think it has to do with the transitions from playing infinitely slowly (i.e. not playing, since it's the beginning of the piece) to playing those notes as quickly as they should be played. I had this problem with Nobody Knows back in the Third Grade Book. The transition from moderately slow melody to fast Alberti bass also caused some flubs in Boccherini's Minuet—and I recall anticipating that it would help with the transition to the fast left-hand arpeggios in Mozart's Sonata in C (K545). Well, it has, to some degree, though I'm still experiencing a bit of a pause where that's concerned. But I digress...
Other interesting portions of the opening are the several chord progressions. See pic above (bottom). I like the chords in that passage; they're teaching me a lot about consonance and dissonance. Some are pretty hard, though. The fingering for this progression that ends the opening is a case in point. The left hand is fine, but the right felt a little weird and stretchy at first—though looking at it on the page, it seems quite logical. I guess separating the pinky from the 4th while trying to hold the pinky down is a bit unintuitive to my fingers... (yeah, I know... what's finger intuition?)
This bit of the opening section mixes the hard arpeggios with very challenging chord progressions! Check out that monstrosity in the first bar. It's a fast broken chord that spans beyond an octave: F-C-A in the left hand. It's pretty murderous. I had tremendous trouble getting the rhythm of that section in my head (much less my fingers!) largely due to the delay elicited by that difficult half-beat. What often happens is that my thumb hits G instead of A, not realizing that even that isn't enough of a stretch. It doesn't help that it's followed by a semiquaver that requires some hand independence--not too challenging since Dorothy, but it did take some time, and therefore added even further delay to the already screwed-up timing. I just started getting the rhythm right yesterday (Apr. 18).
Finally, this jump from an acciaccatura to a chord way up above was more difficult than the ones in The Skaters and Hungarian Rhapsodie 2 because, not only is it a strange Esus chord, but this is also the accompanying chord in the right hand and both require attention to get right. So hard to divide that attention! What I do is use the pedal to sustain the current notes and then set up the right hand to hold that Esus with added tonic. Then I switch attention to the left hand grace-note jump. The result is that I'm better prepared to strike Esus in both hands at the appropriate time. I didn't realise piano playing would require so much scheming! 
Because this piece is a rhapsodie, it's structured as a farrago of different rhythms and melodies sutured together into an organic whole. Each part is an adaptation of a Russian folk song... much like Lizst's Hungarian Rhapsodies are a melding of various Hungarian folk tunes. So, after the slower (but complex) intro, the piece launches into a fast, staccato section with A and E chords in the left hand alternating between their tonic and suspended forms (top left pic). Then it follows with variations on the same theme, but with broken chords in the left hand and broken dyads in the right. Soon it exchanges staccato for semiquavers (second pic above). Slower staccatos ensue to slacken the pace, but then it picks up again to some fast semiquavers (not shown) similar to those already pictured above.
Next some faster staccato chords...
And a big finish!
Finally, a return to the slow opening theme, which has now become the closing theme. It ends familiarly:
Alan Chan's rendition
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