Mendelssohn 'Hebrides' Overture, op. 26

[awesom_o]

Mendelssohn's own arrangement for four hands!

Any criticisms or comments?

[dima_76557]

Mendelssohn's own arrangement for four hands!

Any criticisms or comments?

Wow! You are even better than Sigismond Thalberg who could play as if he had 3 hands.
Seriously: Although I am not familiar with the piece, it sounds really good.

[piano6888]

Well done, and I'm not very familiar with this piece so I can not comment on the specifics in it, but I can give some feedback on the overall playing.  You have good phrasing and voicing over the bass and treble clefs, also good work on the melody.

[awesom_o]

Thank you dima and piano6888. I forgot to mention that my girlfriend and I played this together as a duet-she was playing the primo part and I was playing secondo.

[oxy60]

Having played this as an orchestra member I can say well done.

It is seldom that two players are matched as well as you two. People will pay money to hear this live! 

[awesom_o]

Thanks. That is our goal-to play four hands professionally one day. We've been together for six years, so that helps us with being on the same page, so to speak. The Hebrides is one of the most challenging works we've played for four hands yet.

The four hands repertoire is breathtakingly vast-everything available for orchestral forces can also be played by a good four hands ensemble!

I posted Mozart's 40th Symphony a few weeks ago on here-be sure to check it out if you'd like to hear more orchestral piano. We have saveral other Mozart Symphonies in the works-the Haffner, the Jupiter, and soon the Linz. We also play several of Mozart's actual four-hands sonatas.

We just finished recording the Petite Suite of Debussy-that should be the next recording I post.

Yesterday we began working on Smetana's own arrangement of the Moldau!

We've been focusing on 4 hands repertoire for about a year. There's so much of it out there-we figure in another 3 or 4 years we'll have enough built up to really begin talking to an agent.

[oxy60]

It isn't too early to think about a concert program and how to balance the audience's experience. Each of those pieces take a long time to prepare and you don't want to end up with the wrong mix.

What you play in a concert hall in the winter varies from what you will present on a summer's evening outside.

Keep you the good work!

[awesom_o]

We do give concerts on a fairly regular basis of varying lengths. Some things take longer to prepare than others (full symphonies tend to take a while still) but in general we're both quite good at sight reading. We only started working on the Hebrides about 3 weeks ago. This recording is still quite raw in fact-we'd love to revisit it in future-it was the first Mendelssohn we've done together. I think we could further with it. We've still only played through it 15-20 times in total since we started working on it 3 weeks ago.

Sometimes we alternate between 4 hands and solo music in our concerts. I also intend to play my own compositions but I barely get enough time to compose them let alone practice them