Piano Forum

hi! sorry to bring up an old thread. but i was just trying to get ideas for a topic for my report in a performance practice class and found your question on Turk.

Turk will soon be revived to a greater extent. as of now, we only have 4 (or 6) sonatas of his that are in print. BUT a friend of mine who is taking his DMA here at Temple University in Philly is doing a monograph on his works for keyboard! how wonderful coz he found 40+ other sonatas which haven't been touched for decades. He found them at some library in Halle, and Italy, I believe.

So, we will have more pieces for kids. and on top of that, Turk did have more "virtuosic" pieces for the advanced as well. He has such wonderful music, i never imagined how this guy could be left unpublished for a long time.

Turk was a great teacher. He wrote a very extensive treatise on keyboard playing called the Clavierschule.  This treatise talks about keyboard playing like no other--- it sounds like a romantic approach to the keyboard (and Turk was an old-fashioned guy in the likes of CPE Bach, but in the time of Mozart and Haydn) Once my friend  finishes this monograph this semester, you should contact Temple University for a wonderful new discovery that the world hasn't seen much of. There were only a couple of people who did research on Turk before him, and it wasn't an extensive research work.

here is the website of my friend: https://michaeltsalka.com/
He has done lecture recitals on it already. And he is on his way to playng the whole collection of sonatas on a fortepiano. He is primarily a pianist. Hopefully, we will have Turk in our bookshelves very soon!