Mia Jang - Sweet Dreams - Piano Solos - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Album Tracks 1. Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor ('Pathétique'), Op. 13 1. Grave - Allegro Di Molto E Con Brio 2. Blumenstück for Piano in D Flat Major, Op. 19 3. Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 Romanze 4. Piano Trio No. 2 in E Flat Major, D. 929 (Op. 100) 2. Andante Con Moto 5. Clair de Lune, for Piano (Suite Bergamasque No. 3), L. 75/3 6. Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Flat minor, Op. 23 3. Allegro Con Fuoco 7. Rondo Capriccioso, for Piano in E Major, Op. 14 1. Andante 8. Rondo Capriccioso, for Piano in E Major, Op. 14 2. Presto 9. Tema Con Variazioni, Etude for Piano in a Minor (Transcendental Paganini Etude No. 6), S. 140/6 (LW A52/6) 10. Piano Concerto in a Minor, Op. 16 2. Adagio 11. Gnossienne for Piano No. 2

The piano duet was an opportunity to have fun and make music with friends for Mendelssohn as it was for many other 19th-century composers, who wrote pieces that far transcended their domestic origins and often arranged their larger-scale works for the medium so that it could be appreciated by listeners where full orchestral performances were much harder to come by. In 1844 Mendelssohn made his own piano-duet arrangement of the Incidental music he had composed to accompany a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Potsdam two years earlier, a suite which itself drew on the precociously immortal Overture he had composed as a 16-year-old. The magical purity of the orchestral score is here translated into a limpid graininess which renders each phrase even more crystalline than in the symphonic version, especially in it's most rapid passages. The relationship between the two versions might be likened to that between a sketch and a painting, though with no certainty as to which had been composed first. A comparison of the full-colour orchestral score with the 'black and white' of the piano-duet arrangement reveals how the timbres of Mendelssohn's orchestral imagination stem from the conceptual outlines and regular forms first devised on a keyboard. Thus the arrangement has plenty to reveal about the score to even to listeners intimately familiar with the fully scored original. Having given the triumphant premiere of the overture to The Fair Melusine in Leipzig in 1836, Mendelssohn then arranged it for piano duet the same year. Again, every phrase of the symphonic original resounds with greater emphasis the yielding swell of the waves is evoked by a delicacy of touch rendered almost liquid by brushing of the damper pedal. Album Tracks 1. The Fair Melusine Op.32 2. A Midsummer Night's Dream, Op. 61

Album Tracks 1. Catch a Rising Star 2. Those Eyes 3. The High Tide of My Life 4. Little Flower 5. Pretty Lady 6. Garden in the Sky 7. Seasons of Love 8. Reminiscent 9. Lament 10. Whisper Dreams 11. Soulmates 12. After a Dream 13. Elegance 14. Early Morning Light 15.