Romantic Russian Piano Transcription
Russian Piano Transcription
This beautiful romantic sad piano music is suitable for wedding video, social projects, podcasts, advertising, films. It is a high-quality piano transcription with clear and precise notation and a natural tempo.
This collection of solo piano works aims to introduce pianists to many of the lesser known Romantic Russian composers, such as Bortkiewicz, Liapunov, and Rebikov, who wrote attractive, emotionally appealing music that remains little known today. It also includes two pieces written for the eminent Russian cellist and composer Mstislav Rostropovich, Nikolai Miaskovsky’s mellifluous Sonata No. 2 for cello and piano, Op. 81, and Alfred Schnittke’s Baroque-inspired Musica nostalgica for piano and cello.
The selections range from the grand piano concertos of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rachmaninov, beloved examples at the pinnacle of both Russian and the piano concerto genre, to a wide variety of Russian (and some Polish!) character pieces, including a trepak and a set of quasars by Paderewski, the piano virtuoso born in what is now Poland. The quasars require exceptional pianistic skills, as they feature numerous complex harmonic progressions and clashing dissonant harmonies, in addition to demanding lightning-fast cadenza passages.
Romantic Russian Piano Transcription
A number of the pieces include a significant amount of rubato, in which the pianist gradually stretches the musical line. This approach enables the piece to develop a more expressive and poetic quality, and can be a wonderful way of conveying emotional intensity.
Piano music is scored in a great variety of different ways, from the strict tonal system of F major used by Chopin and other Romantic composers, to more liberal systems such as the chromatic scales adopted by Scriabin. The tendency to shift the key of a work from one prevailing pitch to another is also prevalent, and can be used for dramatic effect or simply to avoid monotony.
In some cases the shift from one key to another is relatively smooth, but it also occurs in a more sudden manner, as in the final chord of the first set of quasars by Roslavets. This is perhaps a result of the fact that the set starts on B-flat, which is one of the keys of the major scale, and also because the bass of the second set begins on the same note (A).
Major 3rd shifts which divide the octave symmetrically are also found in some late works by Skriabin, as in his Prelude Op. 73 No. 1. They may also have a precedent in the experiments with symmetry carried out by Rimsky-Korsakov, and they are commonplace in Russian compositions of a more traditional style dating from before the early Modernist period. The phenomenon is also encountered in folk songs, as shown by the progression in Example vii from Grechaninov.
The use of structural pitches, which point toward later sections of a composition over long spans of time, is an important feature of much post-Modernist Russian music. This is demonstrated in the chorale-preludes of Prokofiev, such as the choruses “Russia the Motherland,” and “Arise You Russian People,” and also in his settings of traditional folk songs such as those from the Calendar cycle.