Adolf Jensen's
Elfin Dance is an animated little piece, as you can tell from the direction to play "
vivace, con grazia." It
would almost be a study in chromatic scales, except it provides fewer passages for the left hand... which is kind of a shame because I need to
work on my chromatic scales. It has inspired me to do a very little work in that area, though. I remember trying to pass the improvement in my right hand chromatics on to the left hand at one point. The piece has lots of pedal work too, and it
augments my recent discovery that euphony can derive from pedaling
scales. I'd discovered that while playing
Aragonaise and pedaling
through portions of "normal" diatonic scales. Now these are chromatic
passages and even those work with pedal! I guess it's sort of a carillon
sound. Note in the opening how the staccatos end pedalled phrases and slurs. This requires precision in lifting the pedal, as it will ruin the effect if sustained.
These tied notes in the left hand are interesting. You don't simply hold them but change fingering periodically throughout out (between the slurs). The right hand has a few ties, too, but much more is going on over there. The chords are not very complicated, but the difficulty is to resist the urge to lift the middle finger as the fourth switches with the fifth. This happens in the middle cluster of the first bar. For that first chord in the ending bar, I actually use the fourth instead of the indicated third finger, so it feels like another example of what I just described, though I can't prove it. A variation on this follows when the opening is repeated and leads into the next section.
This is the chromatic section and it begins with a long 1.5 octave run starting on E and ending on C. The accompanying chords are alternating major and dominant seventh chords in inversion: G7, C, C7, F. Not a whole lot to be said here: start on E and play the next 20 notes. J. T. indicates the fingering here, and I'm not sure I remember any other chromatic passages this long for the past two books, so maybe we were due a refresher. There might have been a chromatic song in the
First Grade Book—something about bells. Nope... I checked. It was just a C Major scale played with pedal and sounding like the eponymous "Chimes" (p. 24).
A descending chord progression follows with some pretty wide chords at one point (octaves) and narrowing to a minor third in the right hand. This was a little awkward to get at first, especially because of the
portamento required in one hand while legato in the next. Actually, I've been playing those
portamentos as staccatos, so I need to revise that. Eventually, though, after rote repetition, I finally got the hands to at least move to the correct notes at the right time
—which is at least how every well-rendered performance begins.
I rather like these runs of staccato-supported legatos even though they did give me quite a bit of trouble to get down. It's awkward holding a chord with 2nd, 4th and 5th fingers, and to shift to that quickly only increases the difficulty. That's what I do with the second of the last four chords pictured here. The second group has me switching from the exact same initial chord to a different one, so of course learning that was akin to unlearning the previous combo. Murderous! (Well... almost.)
Soon we get to this section. It's got chords progressing down the keyboard chromatically. I don't pretend to have this under my fingers well yet. It was easy enough to learn the notes, and they kind of remind me of a manoeuvre we had in
Spinning Song. But this was hard to execute, if not memorise, because the right-most finger of each hand is anchored to one note while the rest of the hand travels left. How unnatural is that? It reminds me of a certain starfish Annie Dillard describes in
The Writing Life: it deliberately breaks itself. My hands are so contorted that it looks as though they are breaking themselves as I try to execute this. The funny thing is, when I watch
a video of someone playing this, the pianist's hands are perfectly relaxed and well shaped as they travel down the keyboard. I try to strive for that level of facility, but it currently eludes me. One day...
After all these forays and difficulties, we finally get back to the theme. It is repeated via a sort of channel in which the right hand travels up the keyboard in intervals of thirds and then launches into that opening run. Then comes this passage, which repeats the opening but in the subdominant key. The original was in C (began on E) and this in F (beginning on A). But then it soon readjusts itself to the home key and ends rather mellifluously with some chords and a final staccato C played simultaneously in both hands as a sort of final punctuation.
Alan Chan's
rendition
The opening was hard on the left hand because it requires a span of ten notes. That's a lot for me. I can't do it with just a span. I had to do a little jump that requires precision. Then right hand was a little different. It required some fine motor skills for the acciaccaturas, which are executed with the 4th and 2nd fingers. However, that came together faster than I expected... even in the harder hand-crossing section, which we'll get to. 
This part also required some effort to hold the first and fourth fingers while wiggling the fingers in between. Not as easy as it looks, but it comes together quickly too. I didn't spend a great deal of time on this song. It's shorter than it seems. It takes up about as much space as any other, but very few repeats. The chords were a little intricate too. A bit of hand-mirroring made it seem sort of capoiera-like—the way the hands just stay the same distance from each other while holding those two-note chords. 
Then there's a key change from A-minor to A-major. It's not so obvious until the key changes back to A-minor because at first there are no sharps or flats to naturalize out before bringing in the sharps. But there they are. And this is the section where the left hand plays almost on top of the right. The hardest part was getting the right hand out of the way before the left had to play. See that triad in the second bar. The 3 4 5 fingers in each hand are pretty much hovering over the same three notes, so when the left hand plays that triad, the right hand has to bolt!
Then we have the double sharps to end the section. The F is already sharpened in the key signature, so to be unequivocal the double sharp sign is necessary. Why does it remind me of something in chess? I must be misremembering. 
Finally we get out of A-Major and back to the home key. It's a repeat of the theme heard in the opening, but with a little coda that does something interesting in the end, changing from a chord in C and F sharps to C and F. In a way, the modulation's a bit like what occurs during the key change, except there's no G# to naturalize. The key bending sounds interesting and is a pretty satisfying ending. 
