Sheet Music Reviews – Page 12

Grieg • A Piano Treasury

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Were I to provide a roll call of the composers whose music is of essential and special importance in the piano repertoire, Grieg’s name would be an early and easy addition to that shortlist (as indeed it was when I considered what music to include in The Joy of Graded Piano series).

For those who haven’t discovered the wonders, variety and joy of Grieg’s music, most of which is suitable for late intermediate and early advanced players (UK Grades 5-8), a new collection from Edition Peters offers a superb introduction to the man and his music.

ABRSM Piano Syllabus 2025-26

Educational Resources

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Whether or not one takes or teaches the ABRSM grade exams, the biennial release of the board’s new syllabus publications remains an important event in the piano education calendar.

Every two years, their new suite of graded books both offers a barometer of current repertoire trends, and acts as an important influencer for the music that will be played and performed over the next few years. Like them or not, these pieces will regularly appear in concerts, festivals, practice rooms, online, and will be much-discussed by teachers, the subject of many questions and opinions.

The popular interest in this syllabus is always evidenced by the tens of thousands who read my reviews of them on Pianodao. In recent years, I have praised ABRSM for breathing fresh life into their music selections, and in my experience the 2023-24 publications reviewed here have proven especially popular with players.

The new 2025-26 books have now arrived, the updated syllabus coming into effect from January 2025 (for those taking exams, the previous syllabus will also remain valid for a one-year overlap period).

So how will they compare, and can they live up to the very high musical bar ABRSM have been setting in their recent repertoire selections? As usual, I will try to answer that question with sufficient detail and depth, but without getting bogged down in prescriptive pedagogic material about which pieces to pick or how to play them…

The Night Time Piano Anthology

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Faber Music’s Piano Anthology series understandably continues to prove popular with late intermediate to early advanced players looking for a bounty of fresh music in beautifully presented, keenly priced, and durable volumes.

In recent years, new additions have generally appeared in the autumn, and the most recent was the excellent Harry Potter Piano Anthology.

Hot on its heels, Faber now bring us another collection, this time resuming the series standard of offering a far broader, more varied selection of pieces for intermediate to advanced players, and celebrating an ever-popular theme: night time.

Schönberg • The Piano Works

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

When music publisher Universal Edition was founded in Vienna in 1901, its goal was to provide core classical and educational works to an enthusiastic Austrian market, but the company soon became associated with some of the most radical modernist composers of the age.

Within ten years, UE had signed contracts to publish new music by Mahler, Bartók, Schönberg, Webern, Zemlinsky, and in subsequent decades the company became the publishers of Kurtág, Ligetti, Stockhausen, Berio and Boulez among many others.

Austrian copyright ownership lasts for 70 years after a composer’s death, and since Bartók’s music came out of copyright in 2015, leading publisher G. Henle Verlag have been quick to produce new urtext editions which significantly improve on the scores previously available.

Now the turn of Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951), Henle bring us his complete piano works in a major new volume, the four most important sets of pieces also available to purchase individually, all additionally available digitally within the Henle app.

Liszt: Années de pèlerinage

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

As a teenage pianist entering the Bedford Festival back in the early 1980’s, I was told that I “didn’t have the right touch for Chopin”, a misty and slightly absurd put-down that somehow embedded its way into my psyche. My young mind decided that perhaps I should switch allegiance to Liszt, whose epic Sonata in B minor was already on my bucket list (where it remains).

Having already enjoyed the ever-lovely D flat major Consolation, I tried my hand at the somewhat absurd St.François de Paulo marchant sur les flots, which quickly established itself as my party piece (and with which I exacted my revenge), before turning my attentions to Liszt’s seminal (if still underrated) cycle, the Années de pèlerinage.

Edition Peters were my go-to publisher for this music, and their edition by the great Liszt student Emil Von Sauer seemed as authoritative as they came. My fixation with Liszt gave way to a fascination with the French Baroque long before I had learnt most of these variously eloquent and virtuosic pieces, but Sauer’s single volume tome has seen plenty of abuse over the years, finally becoming ripe for replacement.

How brilliant to find that Edition Peters have brought out a brand new critical performing edition of all three volumes of the Années de pèlerinage, this time edited by Leslie Howard, a towering authority whose deep knowledge and advocacy of this repertoire has extended to recording a definitive set of Liszt’s complete piano works across 99 compact discs.

Whether you have an older edition or not, this new one in three volumes and with additional pieces more than lives up to expectations…

Intermediate French Favourites

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

In my earlier review of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic titles in Hal Leonard’s Classical Piano Sheet Music Series, I concluded,

“Those in the market for a solid collection of established pieces from each of these eras will find these books offer excellent value. For around £12 a throw, they include a wealth of well-established musical material, sympathetically edited and nicely put together.”

Since then, further titles have been added to the budget-friendly series, the most recent of which has particularly piqued my interest…

Beethoven • The Complete Bagatelles

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Music publishers Bärenreiter have rightly received loud applause for their recent scholarly performing urtext editions of Beethoven’s music.

Of particular interest to Pianodao readers, Jonathan Del Mar’s edition of the complete Piano Sonatas (reviewed here) was a milestone that was soon joined in the catalogue by Mario Aschauer’s landmark Diabelli Variations edition (reviewed here).

Aschauer has now brought as an exhaustively Complete Bagatelles edition that further consolidates the publisher’s lead in this repertoire.

A Bagatelle (French, “trifle”) is by definition a “short piece in a lighter style”, and Beethoven’s, which include the evergreen Für Elise, are surely among the most famous of all. Indeed, it is probably not overstating their importance to say that they set the musical scene for the character pieces which became such a popular staple of the domestic piano repertoire in the Romantic Era.

For the developing pianist, meanwhile, these pieces offer an important bridge between Beethoven’s easy dances and his monumental Sonata cycle. No wonder that they have long been recognised as an indispensable part of the early advanced repertoire, essential for players at around UK Grades 6-7.

The Naoko Ikeda Duet Collection

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Naoko Ikeda: The Graded Collection, for which I had the honour of selecting and editing 24 solo piano pieces by the contemporary Japanese educational composer last year, is already proving a hit with players and other teachers.

Working on that collection involved a deep dive into Ikeda’s work, and the solo pieces in my selection are truly the tip of a tremendous iceberg. But alongside her wonderful solo music, I also discovered that Ikeda has composed a significant body of very enjoyable music for one piano, four hands.

How wonderful that Ikeda has now, with publisher Willis Music Company, curated a selection of 15 of her favourite duet compositions.

The Naoko Ikeda Duet Collection can be seen as a natural companion to The Graded Collection. The book will be welcomed by teachers and intermediate players who enjoy duets, and want to explore more of Ikeda’s music.