Kit kene elvenni : Székely népdal

Chamber Music for Violoncellos 17 : for 4 violoncellos

The latest volume in this popular series expands the repertoire of intermediate violoncello pupils with some unusual transcriptions. This time the editor, Árpád Pejtsik, has arranged Ave Maria settings (one song and three choral works) for four cellos. The first is a classical music hit, Schubert’s Ave Maria. Next is the transcription of a little-known piece from Liszt’s vast output, an item from his 1879 choral work Rosario, followed by an arrangement of the first of Verdi’s Quattro pezzi sacri, famous for being based on an ''enigmatic scale'' (scala enigmatica). The volume concludes with another evergreen, the Ave Maria from Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil. Rather than testing the players’ virtuosity, these slow-moving, contemplative pieces serve more to improve intonation skills as well as a sense of form and proportion. The editor has added suggested fingerings and bowings in order to help with the music's appropriate interpretation.

Gedenkblätter - Miniaturen

This selection is intended to reveal a less-known aspect of the genius of Franz Liszt, the greatest pianist of the 19th century: as a master of piano miniatures. While his large-scale works written over many years show Liszt as a striving composer for whom the creative process was difficult, at the same time, hidden in the shadow of the monumental peaks, the 'moments musicaux' tend to capture him in the process of improvisation, at the moment when a compositional idea flashed into his mind and was first noted down. The miniatures that feature in our selection trace his creative path through six decades (1827-1885), from his youthful testing of his wings right up to his finalfarewell. The manuscript of any piece that did not later become part of a cycle or the starting-point for a larger-scale composition generally remained in the mists of obscurity as a treasured memento preserved by one of his pupils or admirers.