Advanced Piano

Charles Valentin Alkan's cycle of variations Le Festin d'Ésope derives from his monumental series of etudes op. 39, the 12 Études dans tous les Tons Mineurs, and forms the culmination of that work. No...

In the “Nocturnes” for orchestra and women’s chorus, composed between 1897 and 1899, Debussy realised his concept that the musical form should emerge freely from the material. With the tripartite stru...

Bach/Busoni - a pairing that makes pianists' hearts beat faster. This is because Busoni succeeded in making piano transcriptions of works that Bach had originally tailor-made for another instrument in...

Schubert's 22 piano sonatas sketch a most illuminating picture of the prematurely departed composer and of his compositional path. From the first attempts of the gifted 16- to 19-year- old musician on...

Schubert's 22 piano sonatas sketch a most illuminating picture of the prematurely departed composer and of his compositional path. From the first attempts of the gifted 16- to 19-year- old musician on...

Sergei Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini was his last and at the same time most significant work for piano and orchestra. As a cycle of variations on Paganini's 24th Caprice from op. 1, i...

With his Études-Tableaux Rachmaninoff continued down the path that Chopin and Liszt had already set out on with their concert etudes: the most demanding technical tasks are presented in the form of ex...

In Schubert's cheerful E flat major Sonata, the listener is unaware that the composer struggled for a long time to arrive at its final version. Initial sketches date back to 1817, then still in a thre...

The B major Sonata numbers among Schubert's early piano sonatas. Composed in August 1817, it was not published until long after his death. The unusual key (for its time) shows the young Schubert's del...

The epithet "English Suites" - as with the "French Suites" - did not originate with Bach himself. In contrast to the six intimate French Suites, Bach's English Suites adopt a grander tone, each one op...

Liszt understood a "rhapsody" to signify the highest degree of musical freedom: a constant process of transformation and variation of themes and motifs, all bound up with constant shifts of emotion. A...

Volume I of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage, entitled Suisse, is based on impressions he gathered during an extended sojourn in Switzerland in 1835/36. The most important piece of the collection, first p...

The Five Piano Pieces op. 23 are a transitional work in which Schönberg made the decisive step from free atonal music to composition based on tone rows, which however did not yet necessarily have to c...

Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue BWV 903 and 903a is one of his most fascinating works. It was apparently already greatly admired during his lifetime, for it survives in numerous copies which presen...

This rondo for piano was composed in 1794/95 and has become known primarily by its sobriquet "The rage over the lost penny". However, this did not originate with the composer himself, but rather added...

In the second volume, Italie, published in 1858, of the three-part Années de pèlerinage the great names of Italian art and poetry occupy centre stage. Among these was also Petrarch and his collection...

Charles Valentin Alkan focused his work entirely on the piano, and one can hardly fill the page more densely with notes than Alkan did. With that he numbers among the breakneck piano virtuosos who lef...

In the second volume, "Italie", of the three-part "Années de pèlerinage", which was released in 1858, the great names of Italian art and poetry take centre stage. This also includes Dante with his fam...

The eighth Hungarian Rhapsody, published in 1853, treats themes that Liszt became acquainted with during his visit to Hungary in 1846: a folk song, a popular dance melody of the time and a csárdás. No...

The Hungarian Rhapsody no. 10, published in 1853, is based on a composition by Béni Egressy. At that time, the Hungarian national composer directed one of the most famous so-called gypsy bands. When L...

Out of admiration for the "Waltz King" Johann Strauss, Ravel had already planned a waltz composition in 1906, the realisation of which was hindered by other projects and the outbreak of the First Worl...

The Eight Etudes op. 42 by Alexander Scriabin were composed during a phase of great productivity. For many years, teaching commitments had hampered the composer. Gradually, he was able to dispose of t...

Debussy had originally planned the work with the Suite bergamasque (HN 381) in mind, but then published it separately in October 1904, with good reason. He was so taken with the brilliance and inventi...

The cycle with three movements, composed at the end of 1907 and published at the beginning of the next year, contains a singular innovation: Debussy notated the highly differentiated piano part that g...