working on music

Usually it doesn't worry me when my editor asks me to review a performance of a work I don't know. Even if the piece is dauntingly modernistic, it's not much trouble to listen to recordings and internalize it enough to get a sense of what the composer is trying to do and enable me to judge the performance as an interpretation. Doing this has served me well on many occasions. I've gotten through Kirchner and Webern and various such composers.

But the one coming up in a couple of weeks is different. This is a major work of 20th century music that I'd only ever listened to once, decades ago, and found completely impenetrable. I've just gone through it again now, with a recording and score from the library, and it's just about as cryptic to me now as it was before. I can see a couple cracks in the ice wall here and there, but I have a lot of work ahead of me.