Aoi Tori (蒼い鳥) from THE IDOLM@STER, original music by Masaru Shiina, M@STER VERSION by Toshiya Shioiri, piano arranged by Duke of Pianeet, played by Richard Yang on Yamaha N1X with Garritan CFX VST.
Aoi Tori was introduced to me by AnimelodyPiano, promising that this is even harder than Animenz’s Unravel. At my performance tempo I can’t really differentiate between the two on difficulty, I can only say that these two are now arguably the most difficult pieces on this channel (Playing at the tempo of other YouTube videos of this piece is much more manageable). The slow beginning can be deceptive. With the same 8th notes the LH soon after picks up some insane speed with 16th triplets. Also, voicing is extremely difficult to execute due to the speed and complexity. To test my technical limit, I attempted to follow the tempo of the vocal version while trying to maintain musicality, which makes it insanely fast for this piano arrangement. Whenever musically acceptable, I do like to push my limits. Unfortunately I had to sacrifice some accuracy to achieve this speed.