The Joy of Piano Duets

Playing the piano is a great experience. You can be a whole orchestra all on your own, and don't need anyone else to be able to create a complete piece of music.

But solitude can get pretty boring after a while. Someone said that solitude is OK, as long as you have someone to talk with about it later.

Many pianists don't experience the joy of playing with others. But there is something you gain from playing piano duets which you don't get all on your own.

Today my wife, Joan and I have been playing Ulrich and Wittmann's piano duet arrangement of Beethoven's Septet. It was written for clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello and double bass. You may recognise the third movement, because Beethoven also used it in his Piano Sonata, Op 49 No 2 in G Major. This pleasant performance is by musicians from the Verbier Festival Orchestra.



There is a free copy of the piano duet arrangement at the wonderful Petrucci Music Library site.

If you are not in the habit of playing piano duets, you might prefer to start with something easier. Wilhelm Aletter's Four Easy Piano Duets might be a better place to begin.

If you go to the main page of the completely free This is a link to piano duets at the site. Some are labelled as "easy" but "easy is in the fingers of the player" [or is that "mind?"]

I love the scene in Robin Williams' Millennium Man where the robot plays the Berceuse from Faure's Dolly Suite with the little girl.



Katia and Marielle Labèque are sisters who usually play two pianos. Here they are performing Leonard Bernstein's America, from Westside Story.



But perhaps the most enjoyable piano duet is this one from a student concert of the second movement (Andante con cozyta) from P.D.Q. Bach's Sonata Innamorata.

What springs to mind?

When you see this picture of Beethoven, what kind of music do you think of?
His symphonies
or his wonderful piano sonatas?

It might surprise you to know what he spent quite a lot of his time doing.
Although he wrote a lot of piano variations and chamber music, and more than a hundred songs, what he wrote most of was
(drum roll, please Jamie)

Arrangements of British folksongs!

He wrote more than two hundred of them. Why? Because he was paid very well for it. The more they commissioned, the more he churned out.

The portrait on the right is a picture of a teacher of Beethoven (and Mozart). Joseph Haydn is one of the most important composers of the 18th Century.When you think of Haydn, what springs to mind? Is it  his  very popular Surprise Symphony, or his oratorio, The Creation?

You probably don't think of the odd-looking instrument on the left. Do you know what it is? It is called a baryton. Haydn wrote 175 pieces for it, because his patron, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy enjoyed playing the instrument, and kept asking, and paying, for more pieces to play.
It sounds like a bass viol da gamba, and has 6 or 7 strings which are bowed, and 10 more which vibrate in sympathy with the other strings, or which can be plucked. It is very hard to play and fell out of favour. 

Here is a movement from a Haydn baryton trio. Do you think these instruments will ever return to popularity?

Beat That!

When we think of a child-genius, it is natural to think of Mozart. He was performing and composing at the age of five. But other composers also began very early. And some even surpassed his considerable feats.

Did you know that Chopin wrote pieces from the age of seven that were much more demanding to write and play than many of the pieces that Wolfie wrote, even in his maturity?

But the one who is impressing me at the moment is Camille Saint-Saëns. Consider this: at the age of two he could already read and write and was picking out melodies on the piano. He began composing shortly after his third birthday, and by the age of five had given his first piano recital.

At seven he was reading Latin, studying botany and investigating butterflies [the last of which he continued to do for the next eighty years].

When he was ten he made his formal debut as a concert pianist, performing a Mozart piano concerto in B flat and Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto in C Minor. For an encore, he offered to play any of the thirty-two Beethoven piano sonatas from memory!