Piano Street's Classical Piano Blog

Transcriptions and paraphrases played an important part in shaping Liszt´s role as leading musical figure of his generation.
He transcribed both famous and less well known vocal and orchestral works of others in order to promote the music, and in order to challenge himself to enrich the field of piano techniques.

Liszt’s piano transcriptions of a selection of Bach’s organ works are quite simple and straightforward. They became the classic models for all the future works in this genre.

We have now added sheet music to five transcriptions of the Preludes and Fugues for organ by Bach (BWV 544, 545, 546, 547, 548), and we now cover all the transcriptions that Liszt made of Bach’s music.

Liszt: Piano Transcriptions

/henrik

The Italian pianist Busoni’s important achievements as a composer were long over-shadowed by the fact that he was generally thought the greatest piano virtuoso after Liszt.
He also made his mark as a respected teacher of both piano playing and composition, and as an editor of Bach’s keyboard music. His thoughts on Bach’s music have been highly influential, although his editions weren’t exactly what we today would call authentic.

The solo piano versions of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (for organ) and the Chaconne from the second Violin Partita are among his most well-known transcriptions.
True or not, the story of Busoni’s wife being introduced at a function as Mrs. Bach-Busoni says a lot about how famous Busoni’s Bach transcriptions were already in his own lifetime.

In spite of his interest in baroque and classical music, Busoni was certainly no backward-looking composer. In his writings he proposes the use of microtonal scales and electronics, and in 1912 he produced his first work “without tonality”, the Second Sonatina.

Busoni’s major keyboard work, Contrapuntal Fantasy, is based on the final, incomplete fugue from Bach’s Art of Fugue.

25 original pieces by Busoni and 15 Bach-Busoni transcriptions have been added to our online sheet music library.

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Busoni plays:
1. Bach/Busoni: Chorale Prelude (Orgel-Choralvorspiel) “Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gmein” BWV 734 (piano arrangement)
2. Beethoven-Busoni: Ecossaise WoO83 in E-flat

/nilsjohan

The Waltzes of Chopin have little in common with those by Schubert or those by the Strauss circle – he even wrote home from Vienna pouring scorn on the waltz, horrified by the fact that “they actually call waltzes works”. But perhaps with the intention of raising it to a higher level, he went on to make continuous efforts in the genre himself, producing music that has never lost its attraction for pianists or the public.

Urtext sheet music and recordings are now available from our sheet music library for three of the Waltzes:
Waltz – op 64 no 1 in D-flat Major (”Minute Waltz”)
Waltz – op 64 no 2 in C-sharp Minor
Waltz opus posth. in A Minor

The most famous of these is probably the “Minute Waltz”.
Chopin firstly named this brilliant and playful waltz “Petit chien” (Little Dog) since he was trying to depict a dog chasing its tail. However, it later got its nickname from Chopin’s publisher who coined the nickname, intended the “minute” to mean “small”.

/henrik

The Austrian composer Johann Strauss II, in his lifetime known as “The Waltz King”, had his greatest success within the “light music” genre, particularly dance music and operettas.

He composed almost 400 waltzes during his life, among which the most popular are:
- On the Beautiful Blue Danube (An der schönen blauen Donau)
- Wine, Woman and Song (Wein, Weib und Gesang)
- Tales from the Vienna Woods (Geschichten aus dem – Wienerwald)
Emperor Waltz (Kaiserwalzer).

These are all included in the selection of totally 17 waltz-transcriptions for solo piano that we have added to our sheet music library.

/henrik

New Urtext sheet music of the Goldberg Variations by Bach has been published by Piano Street today:

The complete score is now available for download for Gold members from the Piano Street Sheet Music Library.

***FREE SHEET MUSIC SAMPLE***
Have a look at the FREE sheet music sample of the Aria and Variation 1 while listening to Murray Perahia playing the first part of this work.

The relentlessly intricate architecture of the Goldberg Variations still engage scholars after hundreds of years, while the soothing, noble poetry and formidable technical demands of the piece continue to captivate players and listeners.
A number of legendary performances of this monumental work have been recorded on piano as well as on harpsichord and organ, two of the most popular and highly regarded ones by Glenn Gould (piano: 1955 and 1981).

Johann Nicolaus Forkel wrote in his Bach biography (1802) that the Variations had been commissioned by the Russian Ambassador to Saxony Count Kaiserling, who suffered from insomnia. Goldberg was a young musician, who according to Forkel’s (probably spurious) version of events, was supposed to play from the Variations during the Count’s sleepless nights to cheer him up a little.

The thirty variations do not follow the theme’s melody, but rather use its bass line. Every third variation is a canon at increasing intervals, but the final variation breaks this trend and offers up a so-called quodlibet, where a number of popular tunes (among them one that goes “Cabbage and turnips have driven me away, had my mother cooked meat, I’d have opted to stay”) are used to a humorous effect. After this the heavenly Aria with its elusive beauty returns to close the work.

/nilsjohan

The Spanish Dances opus 12 is one of Moszkowski’s most famous works.
He composed this set of five Spanish Dances firstly for four-hand piano duet but later on arranged them in a solo piano version. We have just added the sheet music for both the solo piano and the four-hand version in our online music library.

Moszkowski: Spanish Dances (solo piano)
Moszkowski: Spanish Dances (piano duet)

/henrik

Recent additions to the Piano Street Sheet Music Library available for download within the Gold Membership:

Bach-Busoni
Chaconne, BWV 1004

Johannes Brahms
Piano Quintet opus 34

Frédéric Chopin
Nocturne (opus posth) opus 72 no 1
Rondo à la Mazur – op 5
Rondo – op 16
Berceuse – op 57
Barcarolle – op 60

César Franck
Piano Quintet

Enrique Granados
Goyescas: Quejas ó la maja y el ruiseñor no 4
Goyescas: El amor y la muerte no 5

Georg Friedrich Handel
Suite (G 175-178)

Robert Schumann
Piano Quintet opus 44

Sergey Rachmaninoff
Piano Concerto 1 – op 1
Piano Concerto 3 – op 30

Alexander Scriabin
Nocturne (for the Left Hand) – op 9 no 2
Waltz – op 38

/henrik

The 2009 edition of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition has now come to an end. Those of you who have been following the competition’s live webcasts have been able to enjoy an extensive amount of interesting performances of great piano music. If you haven’t been watching, the great news is that all performances are now available for on demand streaming from the video archive at www.cliburn.tv.

A tribute from Piano Street

At Piano Street we were amazed about the ability to have instant on demand access to all the performances, although it was not that easy to get an overview of the many pieces performed, by who and when.
So, since we are not only passionate about classical piano music but also about organizing piano music in a user friendly way, we spent the weekend putting together a little tribute to the Cliburn Competition and its participating pianists in the form of an organized repertoire list.

The list is featuring various sorting abilities as well as links to the sheet music of the pieces available from the Piano Street sheet music library.

Watch great performances online and follow along in the sheet music:
Cliburn 2009 – Competition Repertoire

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The 2009 Cliburn winners are:

Gold Medalists (tie for first):
Mr. Nobuyuki Tsujii, 20 (Japan)
Mr. Haochen Zhang, 19 (China)

Silver Medalist:
Ms. Yeol Eum Son, 23 (South Korea)

The Live Webcast
The entire Thirteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition was streamed in real time to tens of thousands of viewers worldwide. As of June 6, the webcast player has received 231,265 visits from people in 132 countries. The most viewed performance was Evgeni Bozhanov’s Final Round recital.

/nilsjohan

Variation form was a central feature of Beethoven’s piano writing in general, from his early years until the end of his life.

The many witty transformations of popular tunes give us an insight in how it might have sounded when the young Beethoven sat down to improvise at the keyboard, while works like the Eroica- and Diabelli Variations belong to the composer’s mature masterworks.

32 Variations in C-minor as well as the Six Variations in G-major, both based on Beethoven’s original themes, are now available in new Urtext sheet music and recordings by David Wärn.

/henrik

22 pieces by Sergey Prokofiev have been added to Piano Street’s library of downloadable sheet music:
Four Etudes, opus 2
Four Pieces, opus 3
Four Pieces, opus 4
Ten Pieces, opus 12

Listen to Sviatoslav Richter playing Diabolic Suggestions (opus 4 no 4):

/henrik