The Carnival of the Animals (Le carnaval des animaux) is a humorous musical suite of fourteen movements by the French Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns. The work was written for private performance by an ad hoc ensemble of two pianos and other instruments.
Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18, was composed between the autumn of 1900 and April 1901. The second and third movements were first performed with Sergei Rachmaninoff as soloist on 2 December 1900.
The smuggler (Der Kontrabandiste) is a piece from Robert Schumann’s Spanisches Liederspiel op. 74. The transcription for piano solo is from Carl Tausig, a Polish composer, pianist and arranger considered by some critics to be the greatest of Liszt’s pupils.
The Concerto No 2 was composed primarily between 1787 and 1789, although it did not attain the form in which it was published until 1795. Beethoven did write a second finale for it in 1798 for performance in Prague, but that is not the finale that was published.
Rhapsody in Blue is a 1924 musical composition by the American composer George Gershwin for solo piano and jazz band, which combines elements of classical music with jazz-influenced effects. The composition was commissioned by the bandleader Paul Whiteman.
Pictures of an Exhibition is a suite of ten pieces (plus a recurring, varied Promenade) composed for piano by Modest Mussorgsky. Mussorgsky based his musical material on drawings and watercolors by Hartmann produced mostly during the artist’s travels abroad.
The Nocturne No. 19 in E minor, Op. 72 No. 1, was the first one written by Frédéric Chopin in 1827. Until then the nocturne form had been the exclusive domain of John Field, an Irish-born composer.
The Études-Tableaux (“study pictures”), Op. 39 is the second set of piano études composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff. The Etude Tableau No 1 in C Minor demands a tireless right hand, a syncopated left hand and considerable dexterity.
Impromptu Op. 90 No. 3 is the third piece of a series of eight for solo piano composed in 1827 by Franz Schubert. They were published in two sets of four impromptus each.
