Q:

Practising multiple pieces

I'm currently beginning to study repetoire in preparation for my DipAbrsm piano diploma. In total I will be playing 4 pieces (Bach E minor Toccata, Beethoven Moonlight Sonata, Schubert Impromptu No. 3, Rachmaninoff Prelude in C# minor). As one can see this is quite a mixture, and I was wondering if anyone could give any advice on how to practice many pieces at once and maintain them. 
Any comments appreciated. 

A:

At dip. level, you and your teacher should be addressing this. It's a personal thing, and while one may say practise all four simultaneously, another may say do one for a week/fortnight, then another, and so on. We all work differently, so it's impossible to give good advice that'll work for you.
With the exam maybe 12 months away, I'd be learning a big chunk of one piece, to the exclusion of the others. When I was happy with that, I'd put it on the back burner, and start the next. Obviously there's other stuff to learn, too. But in reality, given something to learn, I lock myself away until I can't play it wrongly (happily, very rarely nowadays do I have/need to do that...) but why should that work for anybody else?
Above all, I wouldn't advocate sitting down to a long (2hr+) session and play more than a couple - until a month or so before the exam, when all need to be played consecutively, as will be expected during the exam.

