Early Intermediate Repertoire – Page 4

The Gradebusters Series

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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Grade exams getting you down?
Who are you going to call?… GRADEBUSTERS!!

Gradebusters is a cheekily-titled series from Hal Leonard, which launched in 2019 with Grade 1 books for piano, violin, cello, flute, clarinet, trumpet, alto and tenor sax.

The series now encompasses five solo piano books, respectively for Grades 1 to 5, each delivering “15 awesome solos”, and together serving up a rich feast of 75 universally popular and neatly arranged songs that piano players everywhere will be keen to play.

The Joy of Graded Piano

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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The Joy of Graded Piano is a set of five deluxe repertoire collections newly published by Yorktown Music Press, and heralds the return of one of the most iconic piano series of all time.

The five books cover Grades 1-5, offering an enjoyable and well-rounded introduction to the astonishing riches and greatest composers of the piano repertoire.

“Attractively presented from cover to cover, these are among the best graded collections currently available.”

Pianist Magazine

Denes Agay’s original Joy of… piano books are one of the great achievements of music publishing. They began to appear in 1955, and he went on to produce more than 50 titles for the series, collectively selling millions of copies. These books remain popular with piano students, players, and teachers around the world to this very day, although much else has changed.

This new series of graded piano anthologies builds on that remarkable legacy with care, drawing together new titles to reflect developments in piano education and musical preferences that have occurred within the intervening decades.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to have worked with the publishers on the development of this series over the last three years:

selecting the 120 included works
editing them afresh, looking to the most authoritative sources, and adding new fingering where needed
writing background notes and practice tips for each and every piece across the series

Using the UK grade exam system as a guide, I have tried to ensure each book in the series offers a wide selection of repertoire, including many of the “greatest hits” of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic piano literature, alongside brilliant newer pieces composed by women and men from all around the world, right up to the present day.

Narcisa Freixas • Elementary Piano Pieces

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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Previous titles in Schott Music’s Student Edition series have impressed, so with the arrival of the latest title, Elementary Pieces by the Spanish painter, sculptor and composer Narcisa Freixas (1859-1926), hopes for another worthwhile addition to the repertoire ride high.

In common with the recent Schott Student Edition of Amy Beach’s Children’s Music (reviewed here), and following on from her three graded anthologies of music by Women Composers (reviewed here), this new edition has been put together by British pedagogue Melanie Spanswick, who would seem to have made it her crusade to revive forgotten works by women.

So who was Narcisa Freixas, and what are her pieces like? Let’s find out…

Angeline Bell’s Garden Notebook

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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Angeline Bell’s Lyrical and Quirky Notebooks were a highlight of 2023, and so much so that in my review of them here I concluded,

“With these two collections, Angeline Bell has certainly burst onto the scene with music that has the same explosive energy as the flora and fauna erupting from the pianos on her book covers. On the strength of these, her debut publications, she can be greeted as a major talent.”

Editions Musica Ferrum recently published Bell’s third Notebook, My Garden Notebook. This latest collection is suitable for players from elementary to early intermediate, around UK Initial to Grade 4. and offers:

“24 easy and melodious piano solos inspired by nature.”

Time to find out whether this new collection lives up to the inspiration of its predecessors…

Paul Harris • Rainbow

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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Originally published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1988, Rainbow is a slim collection of seven miniatures suitable for the early intermediate pianist (around Grade 3), composed by the then upcoming Paul Harris.

Given their quality, it is perhaps no surprise that they gained an admiring following, taking their place on teachers’ music shelves alongside such earlier British pedagogic classics as Richard Rodney Bennett’s A Week of Birthdays and Malcolm Arnold’s Eight Children’s Pieces Op.36.

Rainbow won fresh fans when the sixth piece, Indigo was selected as an ABRSM Grade 3 piano piece a couple of years ago, and perhaps this has been the stimulus for Boosey & Hawkes to bring us a shiny new edition of the collection, complete with audio recordings, performance tips by the composer, and a striking cover that is a better fit for a new generation of players…

Celebrating Disney

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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As the Disney centenary draws to a close, I don’t want to miss the opportunity to highlight some of the recent publications from Hal Leonard celebrating the studio’s unrivalled catalogue of hit songs, spanning the decades.

Having previously reviewed Disney Goes Classical (read the review), which offers a wonderful selection for late intermediate (UK Grade 5-6) players, I have picked three easier collections for this celebration, delivering outstanding selections of great songs for elementary to intermediate players.

These collections are equally prime examples of the larger series in which they appear; those interested in exploring Hal Leonard’s various easy piano songbook series can thus use this review, and these books, as a jumping off point for doing so…

Yiruma • 20th Anniversary Solo

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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“These works were the simplest way of capturing a specific moment and feeling when I wrote them. I would like to share these moments with you now and wish sincerely that my music be a hand to hold along the winding path of life.”

So says Lee Ru-ma, the South Korean pianist and composer better known by his stage name Yiruma, in his introduction to the 20th Anniversary collections of his piano scores just published by Faber Music.

Yiruma first came to my attention, and that of many piano teachers around the world, through his composition River Flows in You, a runaway hit in the new easy listening piano firmament, for a time even eclipsing the ubiquitous music of Ludovico Einaudi and others in that space.

River Flows in You has appeared in (and subsequently disappeared from) a number of popular piano collections in recent years, and in different guises, sometimes accompanied by other popular hits by Yiruma, notably Kiss the Rain and If I Could See You Again, which have similarly become favourites with players and listeners alike.

For the new Faber Music 20th Anniversary publications, Yiruma has scored 14 of his personal favourites himself, and not once but twice, because his definitive versions now appear in both Original and Easy versions.

For their part, Faber Music have given the two alternative editions a matching and lavish presentation that double as gorgeous commemorations of this milestone and practical scores that are a joy to play from…

Notebook for J.C. Bach

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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Piano teachers, students and players the world over are familiar with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Notebooks for Anna Magdalena Bach of 1722 and 1725, and it is no surprise that there was considerable interest when I reviewed Edition Peters superb new edition of them (the first complete new critical edition for some 60 years). You can read that review here.

Given the universal appreciation of the Anna Magdalena Notebook, it is odd that there is less awareness of the notebooks he compiled for his other family members. Of these, the Notebook for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach has survived fully in tact. Following the success of their new Anna Magdalena Notebook edition, Edition Peters brought out a stunning edition of this also, which I have reviewed here.

We don’t know for certain how many other notebooks Bach compiled, but there is sufficient evidence for a Notebook for Johann Christian Bach, and a probable surviving source. Now Christoph Wolff, the leading Bach scholar responsible for the previous two publications, has pieced this together to complete the trilogy, based on extensive research and compelling evidence to authenticate the material.

Make no mistake: this is a landmark publication. So let’s find out more…