13 best piano sound keyboard

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1. Turning The Tables, 2. Trying Signals, 3. The Maracas Of Suspicion, 4. Bob's Favorite (seasonable thoughts), 5. India's Go;den Gateway, 6. Automation, 6. Swing Country!, 7. Telling-ology (Cosmic Sympathy), Self Documentation?, 8. Amelioration, , 9. Parking Lots, 10. The Place of Fame and Elegy, 11. Pyrams Lot, 12. The Last Sililoquy of Mr. Presley, 13. She Said...(Olathe!), 14. Sandscratch, 15. Extension 214, 16. Word Perfect Gigold, 17. The Post Colonialist Seize, 18. My Sister Birds , 19. Don't Look Down, 20. The Fragments of Epicurus.

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"All these finely recorded performances are models of musical grace and resilience." -- Gramophone [BER 16302]

In the hands of Ragna Schirmer, the 16 suites by G.F. Handel are heard as the zenith of their genre. The pianist has the consummate skill to give each suite its own individual character. Her self-assured style and improvisational ability are both in evidence on this recording, while the whole performance is given a contemporary profile thanks to her responsible and clever handling of the modern instrument.

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Mamma Mia The Movie Soundtrack arranged for piano, vocal, and guitar 17 songs from the film adaptation of the megahit musical featuring the songs of ABBA. Includes: Dancing Queen · Does Your Mother Know · Honey, Honey · I Have a Dream · The Name of the Game · Super Trouper · Take a Chance on Me · The Winner Takes It All · and more.

• 17 Songs from the Film
• Piano/Vocal/Guitar Songbook
• Standard Notation with Guitar Chord Frames
• Includes Lyrics, 98 Pages

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Media Type: CD

Artist: JARRETT,KEITH

Title: PLAYS HANDEL KEYBOARD SUITES

Street Release Date: 01/25/2000

Domestic

Genre: CLASSICAL ARTISTS

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This collection of Rachmaninoff's solo piano performances relies on a mix of old and new technologies. Between 1919 and 1929, Rachmaninoff cut these 19 performances to piano rolls, which would then be played back through reproducing pianos capable of accurately re-creating the original performances through pneumatic devices that animated the rolls with living nuances and shades--a facet that differentiated the classier reproduction keyboards from the more common "player pianos." This set updates the technology with electronic devices--transparently, though expertly, replacing the pneumatics. Played back on a Bösendorfer Reproducing Piano, this collection sounds astounding, full of Rachmaninoff's lickety-quick motion and his punching intensity when striking the keys. There are 18 Rachmaninoff selections--some of them collaborations--and one gem, "The Star-Spangled Banner," taken to new places in this 1919 reading. --Andrew Bartlett

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Note from Inna Faliks: I have chosen the music on this CD because literature and poetry inspire me and often assist me in finding the kind of expression and colors I would like to communicate through music. Boris Pasternak s music is inexorably linked to his poems. The strange dynamic contrasts between short phrases in the sonata seem erratic until one looks at them as if they are lines in a poem, lines with a rhythm and rhyme scheme. Boris Pasternak s poetry moves me with its original, poignant imagery; each of his poems is a quest to connect to and to define the artistic process. This poet creates immediate and intimate contact with the reader/listener by opening and exploring his own soul unapologetic, unsentimental and lyrical. The same immediacy and frankness permeates his youthful music. I include Gaspard de la Nuit because, as with the other works, I connect to its vivid poetic context. The sensuous Ondine, the hypnotic Le Gibet and the passionate, sad and quirky Scarbo are powerful poetic images that give life to this music. Rachmaninoff s The Bells is one of my beloved choral-symphonic works. A translation of Edgar Allan Poe s poem of the same name inspired Rachmaninoff to create it. The original version of the Second Sonata, composed at the same time, exudes the same ominous colors, hypnotic luminosity, passion and pathos as the poem and the choral symphonic work, but ends with life-affirming exuberance.

Ukrainian-born American pianist INNA FALIKS has established herself as one of the most passionate and poetic artists of her generation. She made an acclaimed debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age 15, and has since performed on many of the world s great stages, in solo appearances, and with numerous orchestras under conductors such as Leonard Slatkin and Keith Lockhart. In 2005, she won the coveted International Pro Musicis Award, which led to numerous performances including recitals in Carnegie Hall, Paris s Salle Cortot, and Boston s Pickman Hall. Other awards include first prize in the Hilton Head International Competition and Grand Prize in the St. Charles International Competition. She has performed at Verbier, Taos, Bargemusic, Brevard and other noted music festivals. Ms. Faliks tour of Russia in September 2008 was highly praised. Other recent performances include recitals in Art and Music at LACMA in Los Angeles, Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Pianoforte Salon Series in Chicago, and with Concert Artists of Baltimore, the Topeka Symphony, and the South Carolina Philharmonic. Her chamber music partnerships include performances with Colin Carr Nathaniel Rosen, Nina Beilina, Wendy Warner, and others. She has been featured on television and radio worldwide, including WQXR and WNYC in New York, WFMT in Chicago, and WGBH in Boston. Her repertoire encompasses both beloved standard works as well as lesser known and contemporary music. Her teachers include luminaries such as Boris Petrushansky, Gilbert Kalish, Leon Fleisher and Ann Schein. Her earlier studies were with Emilio del Rosario in Chicago, and her mother, Irene Faliks. Inna Faliks innovative interdisciplinary series of contemporary poetry and live piano performances, Music/Words, began in October 2008 in New York. Ms. Faliks, a featured artist at the Streaming Museum, a global online multimedia arts space, credits her love for poetry to her upbringing in the lively city of Odessa, Ukraine.

Review

Poetry…A kind of panoramic vision. --The Washington Post



A delight to hear. Riveting [and] warmly poetic. --The Baltimore Sun



Faliks [played] with fervent thrust, bold inflection, lyrical warmth, seductive charm, and concentration. --The Cleveland Plain Dealer

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Brahms,J. ~ Piano Concertos

Wow! George Szell owned the First Piano Concerto. He played the opening movement like no one else, and he recorded the work with three outstanding pianists: Sir Clifford Curzon, Rudolf Serkin, and this performance with Anton Fleischer. When I say this is the best of the three, I'm making a tough choice, but Fleischer brings a youthful vigor and rage to the music that complements Szell's fiery accompaniment so well that they sound like they're both performing from the same musical brain. The Second Concerto is a gentler work, but it's played with no less vigor and dash. Along with the Emil Gilels/Eugen Jochum performances on DG, these are the Brahms piano concertos to have above all others. --David Hurwitz

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Mozart: Piano Sonatas by Mikhail Pletnev [Piano]

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Glass s music, however, came off as indeed farsighted. Originally a pure modern contrapuntalist, he has come to resemble Bruckner, himself a master of counterpoint. Glass s symphonies there are now 11 have been the primary means for him to try out new uses for vertical harmony and an increasingly expansive expressive language... The new concerto is close in form and style to the current symphonies, especially the excellent No. 11 which premiered earlier this year. In concept, the concerto is a companion to the Concerto for Two Pianos, heard from the New York Philharmonic last week, and likewise an embodiment of Glass s stated interest in putting the piano into conversation rather than opposition with the orchestra. In method, the piece was full of new ideas. There were the familiar rocking tremolos and repeated cadences, but there was also music that had an atypical sense of uncertainty chord changes and harmonic rhythms that not only moved in surprising directions but that drifted off without coming to the resolute orderliness that marks Glass. Many of the cadences were new in his work as well, his insistent language using a new vocabulary. There are four cadenzas interspersed among the three movements, and while they don t share the heroic profiles of the common concerto, they did display Dinnerstein s artistry. Glass wrote this work specifically for her, after hearing her play his work and Schubert in his home, and his own thinking and playing were clearly in deep sympathy with each other. The cadenzas are beautiful, expressive music inside a concerto that itself is beautiful and dramatically expressive, the shape pointing toward heightened moments of realization and resolution. In the performance, the feeling was romantic in the way of revealing personal truths, and Dinnerstein sounded deeply touched by the music flowing through her hands. This was a marvelous performance of a marvelous new work. -New York Classical Review

Review

On Glass Piano Concerto No.3: Like a slowly-whirling centrifuge, Philip Glass s beguiling new Piano Concerto No. 3 given its world premiere at Jordan Hall on Friday by A Far Cry and pianist Simone Dinnerstein isolates and concentrates two aspects of the composer s personality long in particularly intriguing tension: his romantic streak and his meditative austerity. Much of the concerto is a lush churn of unsettled harmonies, soloist and string orchestra in search of resolution. Yet resolution comes not with triumph, but by deliberate, cyclical turns. Dinnerstein opened with a gentle clutch of full, familiar triadic chords, shifting by seconds and thirds, the tonality both enveloping and undermining itself. Throughout the first two movements, minor-tinged melodies and portions of quiet, chromatic bravura from the piano were like 19th-century ghosts drifting in and out of the shadows. Most fascinating was how the steady rhythmic engine was manipulated to produce something like Romantic-era rubato: by polyrhythms in the first movement, steady two-against-three rhythms suddenly leaning into one or the other, and additive rhythms in the second movement, an extra tick of the clock here and there producing a charmingly mechanical swoon. A ruminative cadenza led into the finale, dedicated to the Estonian minimalist Arvo Pärt, and, more than the other two movements, unfolding along classic minimalist lines. Three simple, open-ended progressions, delicately smudged by dissonance, repeated and circled one another with tolling, deliberate tread. It is a drawn-out statement the slow-turning gears of karmic alignment but the players sustained the mood with conviction. Throughout, both Dinnerstein and the Criers seized on opportunities for expression; Glass s engineered rubato was often pressed home with a dose of the genuine article. But they also caught and held the music s patient grandeur, giving each phrase, each chord judicious gravity. --The Boston Globe



Glass s music, however, came off as indeed farsighted. Originally a pure modern contrapuntalist, he has come to resemble Bruckner, himself a master of counterpoint. Glass s symphonies there are now 11 have been the primary means for him to try out new uses for vertical harmony and an increasingly expansive expressive language... The new concerto is close in form and style to the current symphonies, especially the excellent No. 11 which premiered earlier this year. In concept, the concerto is a companion to the Concerto for Two Pianos, heard from the New York Philharmonic last week, and likewise an embodiment of Glass s stated interest in putting the piano into conversation rather than opposition with the orchestra. In method, the piece was full of new ideas. There were the familiar rocking tremolos and repeated cadences, but there was also music that had an atypical sense of uncertainty chord changes and harmonic rhythms that not only moved in surprising directions but that drifted off without coming to the resolute orderliness that marks Glass. Many of the cadences were new in his work as well, his insistent language using a new vocabulary. There are four cadenzas interspersed among the three movements, and while they don t share the heroic profiles of the common concerto, they did display Dinnerstein s artistry. Glass wrote this work specifically for her, after hearing her play his work and Schubert in his home, and his own thinking and playing were clearly in deep sympathy with each other. The cadenzas are beautiful, expressive music inside a concerto that itself is beautiful and dramatically expressive, the shape pointing toward heightened moments of realization and resolution. In the performance, the feeling was romantic in the way of revealing personal truths, and Dinnerstein sounded deeply touched by the music flowing through her hands. This was a marvelous performance of a marvelous new work. --New York Classical Review

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The art of transcription is a very old and time honored craft, dating as far back as the Middle Ages when vocal compositions were often transcribed for the pipe organ and lute. During the subsequent Baroque period, this practice became even more widespread, culminating with works of Johann Sebastian Bach, who is acknowledged today as perhaps the greatest keyboard transcriber in history. Over half of his transcriptions were based either on his own pre-existing compositions or adapted from the works of others.

In the mid nineteenth century Romantic movement, Bach's works were rediscovered and thousands of transcriptions were created from his tremendous musical output. Most of these transcriptions were composed by virtuoso pianists, serving the dual purpose of presenting music that would not otherwise be frequently heard while concomitantly providing virtuoso repertoire for pianists to demonstrate their talents.

Bach and Liszt are certainly among the most important composers in the history of keyboard literature. There are many similarities between them. Both were prolific composers as well as great virtuosos on different keyboard instruments and both were important representatives of their respective Baroque and Romantic periods. Bach and Liszt also demonstrated a predilection for composing skillful transcriptions for keyboard instruments. Of paramount significance, both Bach and Liszt were inspired by strong religious convictions.

By the time Liszt appeared on the scene, the piano had evolved to a complete and powerful instrument that was discovered to be capable of providing a greater depth of expression than any other instrument. To a great extent, Liszt's transcriptions were pioneering efforts and are recognized today as an extremely important body of work. After his death, Ferruccio Busoni, Leopold Godowsky, Alexander Siloti, Harold Bauer and other prominent composers, artists and students, ushered the art of the transcription into the twentieth century.

As the twentieth century progressed, transcriptions unfortunately largely disappeared from concert programs. Busoni, the twentieth century Italian composer and pianist, believed that this disappearance was the consequence of inferior performances of Liszt's works by superficial virtuosos who emphasized brilliance at the expense of melody and substance. Indeed, some of the Romantic transcriptions are fiendishly difficult and a tremendous test of a pianist s abilities. For Busoni, whether a piece was a transcription or not was irrelevant because he believed that all music existed in the cosmos and, consequently, a composer's original work actually constituted the first transcription! For him, a "subsequent* transcription of an original work was, by comparison, a relatively modest step.

American pianist Jean Alexis Smith has enjoyed a versatile career as a concerto soloist, chamber musician and solo recitalist. A native of California, Smith has performed solo recitals at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. and Paul Hall in Lincoln Center. Other solo performances include the Conservatorio de Musica Statale Naples, the American Academy in Rome and the opening recital of the Fundao International Piano Competition. In San Francisco, she has given solo recitals at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, Performances at 6, The Commonwealth Club and Old First Concerts. Appearances with orchestras include the North Jersey Philharmonic and Carleton College Orchestra in Minnesota, and in California with the San Jose Symphony, Kensington Orchestra, Nova Vista Symphony and Stanford University Orchestra. Chamber music appearances include the San Jose Symphony Chamber Players, New World String Quartet, San Francisco Wind Ensemble, Women's Philharmonic Chamber Players, Stanford Contemporary Music Ensemble and the Baroque Arts Ensemble in California.

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The Classical Piano Concerto - Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812) - Piano Concertos Opp 3, 14 & 49 Howard Shelley (piano), Ulster Orchestra, Howard Shelley (conductor)

Howard Shelley’s earlier release of Dussek concertos was described as ‘a real find’ (BBC Music Magazine). This successor is, if anything, even more impressive, culminating in one of the finest unknown piano concertos from the early nineteenth century.

At the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, composers of piano concertos exploited the paradigms laid down by Haydn and Mozart. Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812) composed almost twenty concertos over a thirty-year span, the earliest of these largely mirroring the formal plans of his illustrious predecessors, while several later efforts reflect and manifest new directions and priorities. This second instalment of Dussek’s piano concertos offers a further trio of examples from different points in his career: one of his earliest efforts (Op 3 in E flat major, published in 1787), another from a few years later (Op 14 in F major, from around 1791), and finally Dussek’s solitary effort in the minor mode (Op 49 in G minor, published in 1801).

Born in Cáslav, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), Dussek left home before the age of twenty, migrating via northern Europe to St Petersburg, and subsequently becoming Kapellmeister to Prince Radziwill in Lithuania. In 1784, he began a long, itinerant concert tour, arriving in Paris two years later, where he remained until 1789. Fleeing the French Revolution, he spent the next decade in London, before returning to his Bohemian home at the turn of the century. In 1804, he became Kapellmeister to the Prussian Prince Louis Ferdinand, then returned to Paris two years later, where he remained until his death in 1812.

Dussek’s concertos (his only orchestral works) are mostly cast in the standard three movements. The first movements fall into the so-called ‘double exposition’ concerto form codified by Mozart at the end of the eighteenth century. This is typically followed by a lyrical slow movement (usually in a ternary design) in a closely related key, and capped by a rousing rondo in the key of the first movement. As one might expect, they make ever-increasing virtuosic demands on the soloist. One of the most salient features of Dussek’s later concertos is the absence of the cadenza, which Mozart had considered one of the staples of the form. Dussek dispensed with this traditional gesture quite early in his career: the latest to include one is the Op 14 concerto featured on this recording, from around 1791. He seems to have been the first important composer to omit the cadenza, although most others would later follow suit.

The Piano Concerto in E flat major, Op 3, is light in character and manifests a classical conception of the form, in line with the Mozartian paradigm of its time. In the first movement of Op 3 there is no harmonic digression after the secondary theme, and the thematic material of the exposition is used exclusively throughout. However, more progressive design elements include Dussek’s rather abrupt, Haydnesque shift from G major to A flat major in the development section, the omission of a recapitulation of the primary thematic material, and the lack of a cadenza. The second movement is a lovely ternary setting in the relative minor contrasted in selected places by forceful unison writing between the strings and piano, not unlike passages in Mozart’s D minor concerto, K466, composed a couple of years before the publication of Dussek’s Op 3 in 1787. A contrasting section in the parallel major (C major) follows, capped by a return to the original minor mode. As per usual, a rousing, Haydn-tinged rondo in E flat major closes the concerto with much passing of thematic material back and forth between the soloist and tutti, and several ‘false reprises’ in various distant keys.

Composed approximately four years later, around 1791 (the year of Mozart’s death), the more expansive Piano Concerto in F major, Op 14, shows considerable growth on the part of the composer. While it is equally in line with Mozart’s model of the concerto, its design is more self-assured, revealing fewer ‘seams’ in the formal outline than his earlier work. Thematic inspiration seems stronger, and the harmonic digression within the transition section of the first movement, coupled with the introduction of new thematic material in the development, is indicative of a more progressive approach. This assurance is also evident in the greater scale of the movement, which at almost thirteen minutes is nearly half as long again as the corresponding opening of the Op 3 concerto, and features masterful concertante scoring for the winds, brass, and strings in turn. Virtuosity meets harmonic innovation in the ‘multiple approach’ to the big second tutti, where the solo piano’s semiquaver passagework leads to trills over the local dominant, preparing the ground to cadence in the new key of C major (in a very similar manner to the corresponding section in the Op 3 concerto), before the entire cadential passage is repeated to increase the tension and expectation. The second movement of Op 14 is a beautiful pastoral adagio in B flat major, with fetching pizzicato strings accompanying the piano. This movement is capped by a marvellous improvised cadenza of Shelley’s own devising (the only one on this recording). The concerto closes with a highly virtuosic rondo finale.

As if to announce the beginning of a new era in his approach to the composition of a concerto, Dussek’s Piano Concerto in G minor, Op 49, his first in the nineteenth century, differs strikingly from its predecessors in his oeuvre. Published as Op 49 (and, by virtue of Dussek selling the same piece to multiple publishers, also as Op 50), it dates from 1801, around the same time as Beethoven’s first three piano concertos. It is his only concerto in the minor mode, and reflects a darker and more romantically oriented mood, sombre and filled with gravitas where in the previous two concertos presented here classical lightness and gaiety prevail. The second movement is an E flat major adagio, and the third the obligatory rondo, cast, like the first movement, in G minor.

Subtle and interesting formal innovations abound in the first movement of Op 49, especially regarding the treatment of themes. The first ritornello uses its primary theme for both the secondary (in the relative major) and closing (back in the tonic) themes, as well as the initial theme of the second and third ritornellos. The soloist offers a completely fresh trinity of themes (primary, secondary, and closing), each of which returns in the tonic in the recapitulation. The orchestra’s primary theme is never uttered by the soloist, and vice versa. This disposition of themes goes one step beyond Dussek’s usual thematic treatment, which allows separate primary, transition, and closing themes for the orchestra and soloist, but with a shared second theme. In the G minor concerto, Dussek seems to define a totally discrete, isolated world for the soloist, far removed from that of the orchestra. The development contains elaborate harmonic sequential patterns, unlike the development of any previous Dussek concerto. It would seem that subsequent romantic composers—Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Wieck, Liszt, and many others—were paying attention, as their later concertos would eventually manifest many of these qualities.

The gorgeous second movement, in E flat major, begins with a wonderfully scored tutti which features octave French horn doublings. The fantastic dissonant sonority near the final cadence tinges the lovely conclusion with an element of pathos. The concluding rondo has an alla Turca (or alla Hongroise) sort of feel, with a jaunty, rhythmic lilt. The rhythmic energy is counterbalanced by the darker tonality, as Dussek writes in the minor mode throughout,

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Having spent the last decade together releasing chart-topping music, debuting stunningly original music videos and touring in sold-out venues across the globe, THE PIANO GUYS will celebrate their tenth anniversary as a group with the release of their tenth new album 10, out November 20 from Sony Music Masterworks. The 2 disc album reflects on The Piano Guys' greatest career moments thus far with 15 newly-remastered fan favorite tracks from the past decade as well as introduces their next chapter with 12 brand new tracks.

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In 2015, pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim revealed a brand new piano he had conceived and helped design. The radical re-design of the interior of the piano has led to an instrument with different colors and tonal possibilities. For this first recital on the new piano, Barenboim records works by Scarlatti, Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner/Liszt and Liszt.