Par BARTOK BELA. Bartók?s Second String Quartet was composed ? with several long interruptions ? between 1915 and 1918, after he had spent several years almost solely devoted to collecting folk music. The melody and rhythms of the riotous middle movement ?Allegro, molto capriccioso? provide impressive testimony of how his research trips had taken him as far as North Africa. The first edition of th…

Par BARTOK BELA. Bartók' s 'Romanian Christmas Songs' are based on folk melodies that originated in a pagan celebration of the winter solstice, and which he felt gave ' the impression of a fiery, war-like type of song, rather than a pious and religious one”. Nevertheless, he chose 20 melodies from this collection of ' colinde” and published them under the title of ' Christmas Songs”. In the first …

Kurfürstensonaten. Par BEETHOVEN LUDWIG VAN. Ludwig van Beethoven left us 35 piano sonatas actually. The three sonatas from his days in Bonn, published in 1783, do not have an opus number and therefore do not appear in the canon of 32 sonatas. However, these demanding early works are not to be underestimated. Their piano technique is challenging, particularly because of their differentiated articu…

Par PURCELL HENRY. This delightful string trio is straightforward technically, and will be fun to play for student and amateur alike. The ?Sonatas of III Parts by Henry Purcell? were first published in 1683. A facsimile of the first edition was published in 1975. This arrangement follows the facsimile faithfully, simply writing out the first violin and cello parts of the trio sonata, with the seco…

Par MAHLER GUSTAV. The Song of the Earth , composed in the summer of 1908, is Mahler’s best-known and most personal work. Reflecting drastic changes in his life, its immense emotional density is very moving. Until the very end, Mahler continued to refine the extremely differentiated instrumentation, as is evident in numerous retouchings in the autograph score and engraver’s model. It is therefore …

First Edition. Par KORNGOLD ERICH WOLFGANG. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was one of the greatest child prodigies in the history of music. His early songs, now published for the first time, reveal the young composer's extraordinary talent. Based on the musical language of the late Romantic period, he created a unique world of sounds for Eichendorff's poems: full of melodic expanse, refined harmony and s…

This anonymous sextet arrangement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto was highly popular in Vienna during the composer's lifetime.We know this from at least two sets of handwritten parts which were then in circulation.No piano part has been handed down- indeed, the original sets of parts probably omitted the piano.The soloist presumably studied his part from the first edition of the solo part, pu…