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.
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.
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.
Chinese pianist, 22-year-old Yuja Wang thrilled international audiences with her opening performance alongside conductor Claudio Abbado at the Lucerne Festival on August 12.
“Last year, when Claudio Abbado saw me playing Franz Liszt´s Sonata on French television, he compared me to talented female pianist Martha Argerich and then sent me an invitation to cooperate. In March this year we had our first cooperation and this is the second one”, Wang explained.
Usually, musicians who work with Abbado are well-known masters such as Maurizio Pollini. However this year Abbado made an exception. Yuja is an exclusive recording artist for Deutsche Grammophon. For her debut recording, titled Sonatas & Etudes, released in the spring of 2009, she presented a program of sonatas including Chopin´s “Funeral March”, Liszt´s Sonata in B minor, Scriabin´s Sonata no. 2, and etudes by Ligeti.
Wang continues: “The piece was chosen by Abbado and I think it is quite suitable for an opening concert. It is a vivid and exciting work in which the soloist and orchestra play their own strong roles during the performance. It demonstrates the charm of the orchestra while revealing the delicate sound of the piano. When we were on the stage, there was a wonderful interaction between the orchestra and Abbado”.
Of the five piano concertos written by Prokofiev, the Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26, has garnered the greatest popularity and critical acclaim. The concerto radiates a crisp vitality that testifies to Prokofiev’s inventive prowess in punctuating lyrical passages with witty dissonances, while maintaining a balanced partnership between the soloist and orchestra. Unlike the examples of piano concertos set by many of Prokofiev’s Romantic forebears, the orchestra rises above subsidiary accompaniment to play a very active part in this work.
Prokofiev began work on the concerto as early as 1913 when he wrote a theme for variations which he then set aside. Although he revisited the sketches in 1916-17, he did not fully devote himself to the project until 1921 when he was spending the summer in Brittany. Prokofiev himself played the solo part at the premiere on 16 December 1921 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Frederick Stock. The work did not gain immediate popularity and had to wait until 1922 to be confirmed in the 20th century canon, after Serge Koussevitzky conducted a lavishly praised performance in Paris. The first Soviet performance was on 22 March 1925, by Samuil Feinberg, with the Orchestra of the Theatre of the Revolution under Konstantin Saradzhev.
Prokofiev himself made the first recording of the Piano Concerto No. 3 in 1932 with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Piero Coppola. The recording was made at Abbey Road Studios in London and is the only recording that exists of Prokofiev performing one of his own piano concertos.
1st movement:
Children exposed to a multi-year programme of music tuition involving training in increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with their non-musically trained peers, according to a study published recently in the journal Psychology of Music, published by SAGE. http://pom.sagepub.com/cgi/rapidpdf/0305735608097248v1
According to authors Joseph M Piro and Camilo Ortiz from Long Island University, USA, data from this study will help to clarify the role of music study on cognition and shed light on the question of the potential of music to enhance school performance in language and literacy.
Studying children the two US elementary schools, one of which routinely trained children in music and one that did not, Piro and Ortiz aimed to investigate the hypothesis that children who have received keyboard instruction as part of a music curriculum increasing in difficulty over successive years would demonstrate significantly better performance on measures of vocabulary and verbal sequencing than students who did not receive keyboard instruction.
Several studies have reported positive associations between music education and increased abilities in non-musical (eg, linguistic, mathematical, and spatial) domains in children. The authors say there are similarities in the way that individuals interpret music and language and “because neural response to music is a widely distributed system within the brain…. it would not be unreasonable to expect that some processing networks for music and language behaviors, namely reading, located in both hemispheres of the brain would overlap.”
Abstract:
A number of studies have reported positive associations between music experience and increased abilities in non-musical (e.g., linguistic, mathematical, and spatial) domains in children. These transfer effects continue to be probed using a variety of experimental designs. The major aim of this quasi-experimental study was to examine the effects of a scaffolded music instruction program on the vocabulary and verbal sequencing skills of two cohorts of second-grade students. One group (n = 46) studied piano formally for a period of three consecutive years as part of a comprehensive instructional intervention program. The second group (n = 57) had no exposure to music lessons, either in school programs or private study. Both groups were assessed on two subtests from the Structure of Intellect (SOI) measure. Results revealed that the experimental group had significantly better vocabulary and verbal sequencing scores at post-test than did the control group. Data from this study will help to clarify the role of music study on cognition and shed light on the question of the potential of music to enhance school performance in language and literacy.
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.
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”.
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.
This was a part of Amnesty International’s ‘The Secret Policeman’s Ball’, filmed in 1979 and also starring such notable talent as John Cleese, Billy Connoly, Michael Palin, Peter Cook. The Secret Policeman’s Balls is the collective name informally used to describe the long-running series of benefit shows staged in England to raise funds for the human rights organisation Amnesty International. The shows started out in the mid-1970s primarily as comedy galas featuring popular British comedic performers and later expanded to include leading musical performers.
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 
Several studies have reported positive associations between music education and increased abilities in non-musical (eg, linguistic, mathematical, and spatial) domains in children. The authors say there are similarities in the way that individuals interpret music and language and “because neural response to music is a widely distributed system within the brain…. it would not be unreasonable to expect that some processing networks for music and language behaviors, namely reading, located in both hemispheres of the brain would overlap.”
