Learn Music Notes the Fun Way!
Vertige, Etude No 9, dedicated to composer Mauricio Kagel, is Ligeti’s third etude from Book 2. Widely-separated hands use chromatic scales to create the effect of endless, falling movement, György Ligeti did not complete another étude for three years after finishing Vertige.
Bartók’s Piano Concerto No 3 in E Major, was composed in 1945 during the final months of his life, as a surprise birthday present for his second wife Ditta Pásztory-Bartók. Béla Bartók died on September 26, 1945, with the concerto unfinished.
The Concerto for Piano, Trumpet, and String Orchestra in C Minor, Op. 35, was completed by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1933. The concerto was an experimentation with a neo-baroque combination of instruments.
Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major was composed between 1929 and 1931. The concerto is in three movements and was deeply infused with jazz idioms and harmonies, which, at the time, were highly popular in Paris as well as the United States, where Ravel was traveling on a piano tour.
La plus que lente (The more than slow) is a waltz for solo piano written by Claude Debussy in 1910. The piece debuted at the New Carlton Hotel in Paris, where it was transcribed for strings and performed by the popular ‘gipsy’ violinist, Léoni.
La Cathédrale engloutie (The Submerged Cathedral) is a prelude written by the French composer Claude Debussy for solo piano. It was published in 1910 as the tenth prelude in Debussy’s first of two volumes of twelve piano preludes each.
The Toccata in D Minor Op. 11 for solo piano was written by Sergei Prokofiev in 1912 and debuted by the composer on December 10, 1916 in Petrograd.
Scarbo is the third and last movement from Gaspard de la Nuit, Trois poèmes pour piano d’après Aloysius Bertrand, a suite of piano pieces by Maurice Ravel, written in 1908. The work was premiered in Paris, on January 9, 1909, by Ricardo Viñes.
4th piece from Book I, Fanfares is Ligeti’s Etude No 4 for piano and is dedicated to the German pianist Volker Banfield. György Ligeti composed a cycle of 18 études for solo piano between 1985 and 2001.
The Piano Sonata No 6 in A Major, Op. 82 (1940) is a sonata in four movements for solo piano by Sergei Prokofiev, the first of the Three War Sonatas.