Circus Galop is a piece written for player pianos by Marc-André Hamelin. It was composed between the years 1991 and 1994 and is dedicated to Beatrix and Jürgen Hocker, piano roll makers. Its duration is approximately 4–5 minutes. [1] Piano rolls of this piece are available from Wolfgang Heisig and Jürgen Hocker, who have recorded all three of Hamelin's player piano pieces on the MDG label, which were released in April 2008. [2] [3]
This piece is sometimes considered a precursor to Black MIDI, due to its impossibility and complexity. Circus Galop oftentimes has upwards of 15 notes played at the same time, far too many for one person to play on a piano. There have been performances of the piece on YouTube using one piano but multiple players responsible for different areas of the piano, creating an apparently seamless performance of the piece.
Samuel Conlon Nancarrow was an American-Mexican composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. Nancarrow is best remembered for his Studies for Player Piano, being one of the first composers to use auto-playing musical instruments, realizing their potential to play far beyond human performance ability. He lived most of his life in relative isolation and did not become widely known until the 1980s.
The Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 by Dmitri Shostakovich is one of his best-known chamber works. Like most piano quintets, it is written for piano and string quartet.
Marc-André Hamelin, OC, OQ is a Canadian virtuoso pianist and composer who has received 11 Grammy Award nominations. He is on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music.
The Waltz in D-flat major, Op. 64, No. 1, sometimes known as "Valse du petit chien", and popularly known in English as the Minute Waltz, is a piano waltz by Polish composer and virtuoso Frédéric Chopin. It is dedicated to the Countess Delfina Potocka.
Circus music is any sort of music that is played to accompany a circus, and also music written that emulates its general style. Popular music would also often get arranged for the circus band, as well as waltzes, foxtrots and other dances.
The Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year has been awarded since 1985, as recognition each year for the best classical music album in Canada. It was a split from the prior category for Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year, alongside a separate new category for Classical Album of the Year – Large Ensemble or Soloist with Large Ensemble Accompaniment.
Étude Op. 10, No. 5 in G♭ major is a study for solo piano composed by Frédéric Chopin in 1830. It was first published in 1833 in France, Germany, and England as the fifth piece of his Études Op. 10. The work is characterized by the rapid triplet figuration played by the right hand exclusively on black keys, except for one note, an F natural in measure 66. This melodic figuration is accompanied by the left hand with staccato chords and octaves.
Hexaméron, Morceau de concert S.392 is a collaborative composition for solo piano. It consists of six variations on a theme, along with an introduction, connecting interludes and a finale. The theme is the "suoni la tromba" from Vincenzo Bellini's opera I puritani.
Étude Op. 10, No. 6, in E♭ minor, is a study for solo piano composed by Frédéric Chopin in 1830. It was preceded by the relative key. It was first published in 1833 in France, Germany, and England as the sixth piece of his Études, Op. 10. The tempo Andante in 6
8 and con molto espressione indicate a more moderate playing speed than Chopin's other études with the exception of Op. 10, No. 3 and Op. 25, No. 7. This étude focuses on expressivity and chromatic structuring of the melody as well as polyphonic texture.
Solfeggietto is a short solo keyboard piece in C minor composed in 1766 by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Although the Solfeggietto title is widely used today, according to Powers 2002, p. 232, the work is correctly called Solfeggio, but the author provides no evidence for this. Owens refers to the work as a toccata.
Concerto for Solo Piano is a 3-movement solo piano piece written by Charles-Valentin Alkan. The pieces are part of a 12 piece cycle entitled Douze études dans tous les tons mineurs, published in 1857. With sections marked "Tutti", "Solo" and "Piano", the piece requires the soloist to present the voices of both the orchestra and the soloist. The pianist Jack Gibbons comments: "The style and form of the music take on a monumental quality—rich, thickly set textures and harmonies ... conjure up the sound world of a whole orchestra and tax the performer, both physically and mentally, to the limit."
The Burleske in D minor is a composition for piano and orchestra written by Richard Strauss in 1885–86, when he was 21.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in C-sharp major, Op. 17, was written on commission from Paul Wittgenstein in 1923, and published in 1926. It was only the second such concerto ever written, after the Concerto in E-flat by Géza Zichy, published in 1895.
Enoch Arden, Op. 38, TrV. 181, is a melodrama for narrator and piano, written in 1897 by Richard Strauss setting a German translation of the 1864 poem of the same name by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
The Piano Sonata in D major, Hob. XVI/33, L. 34, was written in possibly 1777 by Joseph Haydn.
Alistair Richard Hinton is a Scottish composer and musicologist with a focus on the works of his friend Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji. He is the curator of the Sorabji Archive.
Black MIDI is a music genre consisting of compositions that use MIDI files to create a song or a remix containing a large number of notes. People who make Black MIDIs are known as blackers.
Images is a suite of six compositions for solo piano by Claude Debussy. They were published in two books/series, each consisting of three pieces. These works are distinct from Debussy's Images pour orchestre. The first book was composed between 1901 and 1905, and the second book was composed in 1907. The total duration is approximately 30 minutes. With respect to the first series of Images, Debussy wrote to his publisher, Jacques Durand: "Without false pride, I feel that these three pieces hold together well, and that they will find their place in the literature of the piano ... to the left of Schumann, or to the right of Chopin... "
The Concerto for Piano and Orchestra is a composition for solo piano and orchestra by the American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. The work was written on a commission from Carnegie Hall, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and the League of American Orchestras. It was the first composition ever commissioned by either Carnegie Hall or the League of American Orchestras. The world premiere was performed by the pianist Marc-André Hamelin and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Günther Herbig at the Meadow Brook Music Festival in Rochester Hills, Michigan, on June 26, 1986. The piece is dedicated to Günther Herbig.
The Piano Concerto in F minor, Op. 114, is a concerto for piano and orchestra composed by Max Reger in Leipzig in 1910. He dedicated the work to Frieda Kwast-Hodapp, who premiered it in Leipzig on 15 December 1910 with the Gewandhausorchester conducted by Arthur Nikisch. The difficult composition has been rarely performed and recorded. Pianists who have tackled it range from the American Rudolf Serkin, who first recorded it in 1959, to Markus Becker who was the soloist in an award-winning recording in 2017.