SKU: BT.9780008306144

ISBN 9780008306144.

Get Set! Piano Christmas Crackers contains over 30 carols for the beginner pianist, featuring a range of techniques and quizzes to support musical development from the very first lessons to Grade 2.

Full of festivefavourites such as Jingle bells, Silent night and Deck the halls, with a few lesser known carols included for good measure, many of the pieces have simple but effective teacher duet parts to encourage ensemble playing from thestart. The book is illustrated throughout in the charming Get Set! style, and students are encouraged to decorate and colour in the drawings to reflect their progress.

Packed with fantastic, tried-and-tested arrangementsanda variety of fun activities to reinforce learning, this is the ultimate beginner piano Christmas book!

SKU: HH.HH512-SOL

ISBN 9790708185222.

Symphony No.63 La Roxelane the first movement of which re-employs (with reduced instrumentation and some structural adjustment to conform to its new symphonic setting) the overture to Haydn’s opera Il mondo della luna which was originally composed for the 1777 season at Esterháza. The second movement, headed Roxelane Allegretto, is a set of variations on the French melody La Roxelane which reveals itself as an early example of the composer’s favoured double-variation form of contrasting major and minor key sections. Roxelane herself is the leading female character in Les trois sultanes, a stage play by Charles Simon Favart performed by Karl Wahr and his theatrical troupe in a German translation at Esterháza in that same year with (we assume) incidental music by Haydn. The Menuetto and concluding Finale Presto of the symphony were newly-composed and do not (as far as we know) make use of re-cycled theatrical music.

SKU: BR.BG-922

ISBN 9790004140192. 9 x 12 inches.

When the mathematically oriented compositional method started losing favour, composers began turning again more strongly to the piano, from the midsixties on, and discovered, as it were, the new poetry of the instrument through effects obtained with harmonics and preparation. For this reason, only a few pieces dating from before 1965 have been selected. Most of the following pieces were composed especially for this anthology. They are arranged in order of increasing difficulty. While the first volume is intended more for the amateur, the second volume presupposes a greater degree of skill. Due to the great number of composers, it was impossible even to pretend to offer a representative cross-section of contemporary German piano music. Several composers had to be excluded because they wrote no notable works for piano. Another criterion influencing the selection of pieces was the effort to present the most varies styles of piano writing possible. Moreover, special notice has been given to the works which display originality, even though their authors are not among the most widely known and marketable musicians of the day.

SKU: FG.55011-717-4

ISBN 9790550117174.

It was through Einar Englund (1916-1999) that the Neoclassicism already familiar elsewhere in the world landed on Finnish shores in the late 1940s. A composer especially of large-scale orchestral and chamber works, Englund is one of the greatest Finnish symphonists.

Sinuhe is an example of a Finnish composition founded on a non-Finnish subject handled in a non-National-Romantic way. This probably partly explains why the score has fallen into oblivion in Finland: the Oriental moods and the Nile do not correspond to the view of a Finnish composition as one favouring topics from the national epic, the Kalevala, and lakeland scenery. The music also incorporates motifs derived from Lapp yoiks used by Englund in his score for the film The White Deer (1952). When it was written, the ballet's combination of a historical subject with an exotic, stylised idiom showed that Englund had his finger on the international pulse, unlike, say, Samuel Barber's ballet Medea (1946) and Aram Khachaturian's ballet Spartacus (1956).

The suite from Sinuhe is in five scenes. It omits the original overture and almost all the music for the second half of the ballet. Sinuhe's hapless love for the courtesan Nefernefer is described with languorous sensuality. His servant Kaptah throws himself into a frenzied dance with the Cretan maidens. The suite ends with the rhythmic war dance of his friend Horemheb.