Alborada Del Gracioso (RAVEL MAURICE)

In his ?Autobiographical Sketch? Ravel looks back and stresses the importance of his ?Miroirs? (HN 842) published in 1906 for his harmonic evolution. He said that they had ?disconcerted even those musicians who had been mostfamiliar with my compositional style up to then?. This is particularly true of the fourth piece in the collection ?Alborada del gracioso? (Morning song of the court jester) with its frequent employment of harsh dissonances. Thisboth technically and musically charming genre scene full of rousing ideas and rhythms is one of the French composer?s best-known piano pieces today. We are now issuing it in a single Urtext edition.

The New Essential Companion. Henrik Wiese, the internationally renowned orchestral and solo flautist, has spent four years compiling what promises to be the definitive guide to audition repertoire for students preparing for a seat in a professional orchestra. He has worked with his own students in Salzburg as they engaged in auditions, as well as with other professional players and his teaching colleagues at the conservatorium. He sourced repertoire lists from job advertisements past and present and referred to other audition lists such as those of Baxtresser and Wye. Considerable research has gone into the differences between existing editions of the chosen pieces even, surprisingly, from twentieth century composers such as Prokofiev and Stravinsky. 'The Flute Audition” then looks at practical matters such as page turns and metronome markings. Wiese comments, for example, that Hindemith's own recording takes a passage from 'Symphonic Metamorphoses” markedly slower than in the score. The result of all this painstaking research is the most comprehensive collection of international audition pieces yet published in a single volume. 'This is an excellent collection of orchestral excerpts for the next generation of young musicians. You can use it to prepare for auditions anywhere in the world. Whether it's for an opera house, symphony or chamber orchestra, everything you need is here.'/ Recueil / Flûte Traversière