SKU: AP.47088
ISBN 9781470640460. UPC: 038081540160. English. Melody Bober.
The term xtreme is often used in sports to indicate feats that go beyond the ordinary. The pieces in Solo Xtreme were written to encourage students to achieve similar feats. The late intermediate to early advanced pieces challenge students to change locations, cross hand-over-hand, play large chords, use the pedal to create color and moods, and vary articulations. At the same time, they expand technique and musicianship. Titles: Carnivale! * Island Jazz * Lazy Day * Prelude in E Minor * Scherzo * Soliloquy * Storia d'amore * Tempest.
SKU: AP.47086
ISBN 9781470640446. UPC: 038081540146. English. Melody Bober.
The term xtreme is often used in sports to indicate feats that go beyond the ordinary. The pieces in Solo Xtreme were written to encourage students to achieve similar feats. The early intermediate to intermediate pieces challenge students to change locations, cross hand-over-hand, play large chords, use the pedal to create color and moods, and vary articulations. At the same time, they expand technique and musicianship. Titles: Blues Harmony * Gallop Across the Plains * Kilkenny Jig * Lakeside Tranquility * Mountain Grandeur * Nocturne * Ragtime Escapade * Trieste Tarantella.
SKU: HL.50510737
ISBN 9790080044940. UPC: 073999761832. 8.0x11.25x0.04 inches.
SKU: HL.14040983
French.
The Modal Column is a cycle of paired pieces for piano, starting from the classical structure- prelude-fugue - used by Bach in Das wohltemperierte Klavier. The modes that are being used have a relatively simple octavizing structure, hence an almost infinite variety of combinations that can generate a large number of pieces, impossible to exhaust by a composer. Therein lies the idea of a column, in the sense given by Brancusi, i.e. an endless succession of modules.
In the vision of the author, the mechanism of the mode is a secondary (ancillary) aspect, the primary goal is deciphering the ethos incorporated in it.
The prelude-fugue structure hypostatizesthe musical discourse at the two possible extremes. free-constructed. While Romanian music rules in free areas, like any old music with an (especially oral) tradition, the constructed pieces start from Dutch (Flemish) or Venetian polyphony, which precedes the idea of fugue, understood as a technology of the movement (dynamics) of sound, after the models of Giovanni Gabrieli or Ockeghem.
The Modal Column is first of all the presentation of a melodic world but, as the subtitle indicates, also an investigation into the ethos of Romanian music. The forms in which the pieces are thought are simple, non-ostentatious, the whole cycle being in fact a musical workshop, whose better parts may be worth including in ampler works. Before the succinct description of the six couples in Books I and II, a few observations, necessary from a musicological point of view:
SKU: HL.49017065
ISBN 9790220130571. 9.0x12.0x0.052 inches.
Taking his starting point from 17th century philosopher-poet Cyrano de Bergerac's 'Grandes Plaines du Jour', Hesketh powerfully fuses a huge range of performing and compositional techniques into this 12 minute work for solo violin. Inspired by Bergerac's imaginations of other worlds and utopian societies, the work explores extreme ranges and timbres whilst using techniques such as left hand pizzicato and natural harmonics. Open-fifth material, which is natural to the instrument, is prominent and short duets alternating between arco and pizzicato figures add yet another dimension.
SKU: BT.EMBZ14702
The special pedagogical value of the character pieces in this volume is enhanced by the fact that they do not make technical demands beyond music school level. Thus, students are introduced to the world of the Romantic style without having to struggle with the extreme difficulties of the piano works of Chopin or Liszt. Die Charakterstücke in diesem Heft besitzen einen besonderen pädagogischen Wert, da keines von ihnen die technischen Ansprüche der Musikschule überschreitet. Sie bringen dem Schüler die Welt der Romantik also näher, ohne dass sie die technisch tückischen Chopin- oder Liszt-Klavierwerke bewältigen müssten.
SKU: BT.PWM0231
English.
The collection (Op. 28) includes all 24 major and minor tonalities arranged in a circle of fifths, with each major key being followed by its relative minor. Contrary to custom of using this type of piece as didactic material, Chopin's cycle was intended as concert music. The Preludes can be seen as a microcosm of 24 categories musically expressed through basic oppositions such as mode, tempo, articulation, texture, etc. They were referred to as an extravaganza of unusual and extreme emotional states, a full reflection of the inner world, and at the same time a reflection of harmonia aeterna. These works were edited by by I. J. Paderewski, L. Bronarski and J. Turczy ski.
SKU: HL.48025411
UPC: 196288202288.
The composer states that her Cello Concerto is antithetical to her other concertos. “While in the concertos for violin and piano, in the Double Concerto, and in my new sheng concerto I was seeking to merge the solo instrument and the orchestra into a single virtuoso super-instrument, here itÂ’s all about the competitive tension between the soloist and the orchestra. The 'aura' of the cello was the initial nucleus and forms the basis of the music, so the whole structure of the piece is thus 'carried' by the cello. However, the orchestra responds to it in an antagonistic way. This antagonism is much stronger than in traditional Classical-Romantic concertos; one could even speak of a 'psychological warfare' between soloist and orchestra. In my cello writing, I often ask the soloist to disguise the nature of the instrument so the perception can be blurred. I try to explore the boundaries of the celloÂ’s expressivity and to broaden the definition of 'expression'. Therefore I also use special playing techniques and call for unusual timbres, including noises and rasping sounds. For me, this actually serves the expressivity by suggesting new meanings. The unique artistry of Alban Gerhardt inspired me immensely. Not only his solo part but also the orchestral parts are often characterized by extreme virtuosity, by the idea of the instrumentalists being pushed to the edge.â€.
SKU: HL.48025216
ISBN 9781784548124. UPC: 196288133445. 9.0x12.0x0.371 inches.
Leokadiya Kashperova (1872–1940), hitherto consigned to a footnote in musical history as Stravinsky’s piano teacher, is undergoing rediscovery. A double graduate of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, she emerged as a virtuoso pianist and composer in the romantic tradition. She was associated with some of the great musicians of her day, including Balakirev and Auer. She performed in both Germany and the UK in the 1900s, but her career petered out after 1920. The Piano Concerto (1900) is Kashperova's earliest surviving orchestral work, and it was premiered by the composer the following year in Moscow and St Petersburg, bringing her much wider recognition and paving the way for an international career. Cast in three movements and in a Romantic idiom, pianistic virtuosity is often channelled into the pianist’s left hand, which is required to negotiate widely-spaced 'extreme' arpeggios – awkwardly angular when adagio, fiendishly technical when molto allegro. Kashperova's orchestral colours are achieved by felicitous solos for the woodwind, horns and brass. Noteworthy, too, are unexpected glimpses of chamber music when, in the last movement for example, the piano combines fleetingly with solo violin and solo cello in passages. Theconcerto’s quick music (Molto allegro and Allegro con anima) admirably portrays the vivacious personality of their composer, described in 1906 as offering those around her 'an abundance of joy, excitement and fun'. The central movement, by contrast, is a tender Adagio which offers the listener a gem of musical poetry.
SKU: HL.14008425
ISBN 9780711933545.
Davies's feeling for the potency and bravura of the clarinet goes back to works of the 1960s; his concerto for the instrument is predictably a big, ranging piece, in two linked movements. The first, fast with a brief slow introduction, has the soloist in propulsive melodic flights slipping over into florid runs, but it is a virtuoso piece for the orchestra, especially for the marimba and pair of horns. The Adagio that follows is in the spare, cold, birdcall-riven style of other recent Davies slow movements, exploiting first the clarinet's low register and then, at its climax, the instrument's high extremes. A cadenza leads to the coda, where Davies introduces a Scots tune, previously hinted at, with which he brings the work to an end in F sharp major. Clarinet part with piano reduction of the orchestral score.
SKU: HL.14019121
ISBN 9781844492954. 9.0x12.0x0.303 inches.
Commissioned by the first Sibelius Conductor's Competition held in Helsinki in May 1995, as an obligatory piece to be rehearsed by all the competitors, Arena was performed in its totality at the annual Avanti! Chamber Orchestra's festival in Porvoo (Finland). Thematic thinking has never been a main feature in Lindberg's music, but here horizontal lines (one would not yet dare to call them melodies) gain some independence, for example in ornamental figures and in the intense cello solo around the middle of the piece. Arena also reveals some clearly new material - Lindberg has talked about Beethoven-like formal thinking, referring to a passage where the sense of movement seems to accelerate to an extreme so that finally one perceives only a motionless surface. Another new element - which was already used to some extent at the warmly hovering ending of Aura - is the almost romantic sound world and the suspension of the harmonies in the final climax, which can make one think of Mahler and Berg, or Lindberg's grand predecessor and compatriot, Sibelius. This is the Score, published by Chester Music; the duration of the pieces is approximately 16 minutes.
