Piano/Cello duets?

[lostinidlewonder]

One of my students found out that a neighbor plays the cello and so they both decided to try some piano/cello duets. She asked me for some music but I am a little lost with this repertoire. Can anyone suggest some easy but nice sounding duets? TYIA!

[awesom_o]

Honestly, even the 'easier-sounding' works for piano and cello will be pretty hard for the pianist. It's just the way with chamber music. The Swan from Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saens sounds lovely and is one of the easier accompaniment parts to handle. Also try 'Elegie' by Massenet-same thing...well-known, lovely piece, not too hard piano part.

Moving up on the scale of difficulty and musical worth, there are 5 lovely sonatas by Beethoven, one by Chopin, and one by Rachmaninoff. Two by Brahms. Real virtuoso stuff.

My best advice would be to pick up Suzuki Cello books 3,4, and 5. There should be plenty of great, easy-ish pieces in those volumes!

Good luck! I love to play the cello!

[drewp]

You could also try IMSLP. It allows you to search by instrumentation and not only you'll find hundreds of titles but also the scores as well!

[patrickd]

Prokofiev's Cello Sonata is a great piece of music, though it's probably on the difficult side.

[cometear]

I absolutely adore the Brahms Cello Sonata in E minor. It's such a wonderful piece. The Beethoven Cello Sonatas are gorgeous as well. Maybe you could find a violinist and pull together a Mozart, Beethoven, or Haydn piano trio? There's always cello concertos if your pianist could learn the orchestra part. I never tried anything like that before but it seems pretty cool.

[j_menz]

If you don't know how to use the IMSLP function (and it's neither simple not 100% accurate), here's a sample page with some non-sonata (mostly) duets:

https://imslp.org/index.php?title=Category:Scores_featuring_the_cello&intersect=Duets&transclude=Template:Catintro