Barbara Arens writes... A fact: I love Scotland. Every time I come home after travelling in Scotland I feel myself bursting with ideas inspired by all I've seen and experienced there. The heather-covered hills and the dusky forests the wind the amazingly pure air the mysterious ruins - and especially the water - be it a dark brown burn a roaring waterfall heavy clouds a gentle mist or the waves of the North Sea or a loch just begging to be explored - and the people I meet and their lovely almost always comprehensible speech...What a source of inspiration! And then there's the music - nothing is more thrilling than hearing massed bands of pipes and drums aswell as the rich tradition of folk music. So I come home and sit down at the piano and try to put these impressions into music trying always to keep the pieces as easily playable as possible - I want my piano students to enjoy them and express themselves through them without struggling with technical difficulties.So some of these pieces reflect my impression of a landscape standing stones a sunset over a loch; but some of the pieces are based on actual traditional gaelic songs and tunes. A wonderful discovery was finding the Scots Musical Museum the collection of traditional songs assembled and revised to a great extent by Robert Burns which appeared in Edinburgh 1769 1803 - a fantastic resource.I'm hoping you'll enjoy playing this collection of Scottish Piano pieces.

Hawkes Pocket Scores HPS 1468-Originally a ballet score this 30' work is scored with strings and consists of three movements:'cumnock fair': A 12-minute fantasy based on dance melodies by the 18th-century Cumnock composer John French. The moods range widely from playful rustic archaic ungainly dreamy boisterous stately brutal and grotesque to mysterious and unnerving.'shambards'': Memories of Burnsian folksong are interrupted by new dance tunes built on fragments from the Mad Scene from Act 3 of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor based on the novel by Walter Scott.'shamnation'. Low throbbing in the piano becomes a drumbeat to accompany a fast violin reel using three tunesand following a traditional 8-bar structure. The solo piano part emerges as a counterpoint to the Scottish themes after which the music winds its way through many different keys.