Schott Music – Page 2

Amy Beach • Children’s Music

Pianodao Music Library
Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales

Back in 2019 I reviewed an excellent edition of Türk’s Pieces for Beginners, which launched the new Schott Student Edition. It has been a while, but now Schott have launched a couple more titles in the series, the first of which features two collections by the popular American composer Amy Beach (1867-1944), her Children’s Album Op.36 and Children’s Carnival Op.25, together in one elegant volume.

Individual pieces from these collections may be known to readers from their appearance in graded collections and anthologies of music by women composers. How wonderful, though, to have complete versions brought together in this publication, which also includes in-depth background and teaching notes on each piece by editor (and well-known teacher) Melanie Spanswick.

Schott’s Easy Concert Duets

Pianodao Music Library
Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales

A few years ago I reviewed Schott’s Easy Concert Pieces, a series of three excellent anthologies of core classical repertoire, which progressively deliver a rich pedagogic diet of music suitable for elementary to intermediate players. Since then I have been using these cost-effective books at my studio in Milton Keynes, where they have proved especially popular with teenage and adult learners.

Now, Schott are back with a new collection, this one more suitable for early advanced players, and delivering an appealing selection of core material for piano, four hands. The book offers “20 Original Pieces from 4 Centuries”, and includes favourites by Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Bizet, Fauré, Moszkowski, Debussy and more.

With ‘social distancing’ a receding memory for most of us, this could be a great time to start exploring the duet repertoire, and this just might be the ideal collection to help us do that. Let’s find out if it is…

Scott Joplin • 20 Ragtimes

Pianodao Music Library
Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales

The Chicago World Fair of 1893 established Ragtime music as a national craze in the US, and by the end of the decade, the “King of Ragtime” Scott Joplin (1868-1917) was enjoying immense success as the composer of the genre’s biggest hits, most notably the Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899.

Joplin died at the age of just 49, by which point he had composed just 53 piano pieces pieces, ten songs, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. Nevertheless, his impact on music was seismic, and a number of his works remain among the best loved in the whole piano repertoire.

It is, of course, for his Ragtime pieces that Joplin is particularly remembered, and a newly reissued publication in the Schott Piano Classics series presents 20 of the best known in a superb performers edition.

These are seminally important works in the solo piano repertoire, the emergence of jazz, and in the broader cultural history of the 20th century. And yet they remain somewhat under-represented in the music catalogue, as they do on exam lists and in concert. So this arrival is happy news indeed…

The Restoration of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Pianodao Music Library
Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales

The piano music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) is surely one of the great treasures of the solo repertoire, too long overlooked but now rightly being rediscovered and brought back into the spotlight.

Schott Music, who published many of these works during the composer’s lifetime, have begun painstakingly re-releasing Coleridge-Taylor’s output in modern performing editions. Among the piano scores restored to the Schott catalogue, and the subject of this review, are the Three Humoresques Op.31 (1898), Three Cameos Op.56 (1904), and (perhaps best-known), Three Fours: Valse-Suite Op.71 (1909).

These pieces all offer wonderful examples of Coleridge-Taylor’s art, and would suit players at around UK Grade 8 to Associate Diploma level. So let’s take a closer look, and reflect on their value…

My First Schubert

Pianodao Music Library
Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales

Schott Music’s My First Composers collections continue to prove one of the most quirky and enjoyable series of recent years.

With their combination of covers that resemble childrens’ storybooks, and content that includes music up to Grade 8 and beyond, they equally suit child prodigies and older players with a self-deprecating sense of fun!

I have previously been impressed with My First Beethoven (reviewed here), Haydn (here), Schumann (here) and Tchaikovsky (here). Each of these delivers a generous mixture of classics and lesser-known pieces, beautifully presented on cream paper within, and freshly edited by Wilhelm Ohmen.

The latest addition to the series is devoted to the music of Franz Schubert, delivering 37 solo pieces and 10 duets, and seems to me another immediate winner…

Women Composers: A Graded Anthology

Pianodao Music Library
Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales

Hot on the heels of Karen Marshall’s lovingly curated HerStory from Faber Music, which I recently reviewed here, Schott Music bring us three brilliantly compiled and vividly presented collections of music by neglected female composers past and present.

Melanie Spanswick’s Women Composers: A Graded Anthology is equally as groundbreaking, and being a larger series these books offer space to a wider and more diverse range of repertoire, particularly in their inclusion of playful jazz and 20th century piano works.

It is interesting to note that of the 30 works in Marshall’s book and the 52 more here, not only are there no actual duplicates, but few of the composers themselves appear twice, an extraordinary confirmation (were it needed) that the pool of neglected music by female composers is a deep one indeed.

So let’s cast an eye over Spanswick’s series…

Patrik Pietschmann’s Movie & TV at the Piano

Pianodao Music Library
Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales

Describing Patrik Pietschmann as an “internet sensation” is something of an understatement. Boasting stats that comprehensively put most online pianists to shame, the German YouTuber’s epic piano arrangements of popular soundtracks have gained him more than two million subscribers and over 500 million video views.

Now, in something of a publishing coup, Schott Music bring us his first printed collection, delivering ten of his most globally popular arrangements. This clearly isn’t to be missed; here’s the Pianodao review…

Martin Stadtfeld’s Händel Variations

Pianodao Music Library
Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales

At the age of seven, Martin Stadtfeld had a clear vision of his career goal: to become a concert pianist. From his first piano lessons with Hubertus Weimar he explored counterpoint and harmony. At 14 he went on to study with Lev Natochenny in Frankfurt, and by the age of just 22 he had signed to SONY Music Germany and released his debut CD: a recording of Bach’s monumental Goldberg Variations.

Fast forward a decade and a half, and with a string of successful recordings behind him (including Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Chopin), Stadtfeld turned to Handel for inspiration for his 2019 Händel Variations recording. Transcribing the great Baroque composer’s themes to produce fresh new piano showpieces, much as he had previously done for his Hommage to Bach album the previous year, Stadtfeld scored another hit.

And now, following the album’s popularity, Schott Music have delivered the official sheet music score of Stadtfeld’s “transcriptions for piano solo on themes by Georg Friedrich Händel”. Let’s have a look…