Piano Bulletin (EPTA)
Year 41, 2023 nr. 3
Diabelli opus 149 (28 melodische Übungsstücke)
Diabelli opus 189 (Prüfungs-Stücke)
What aspiring pianist hasn’t enjoyed their first quatre-mains playing with their fellow student or teacher? And for whom was not the extremely popular album 28 melodic Übungsstücke, opus 149, the first introduction to four-hand piano music by a real composer from Beethoven’s time?…
Piano Bulletin (EPTA)
2005-2
Valuable editions of early piano music
Van Sambeek Edities is a small publishing firm of sheet music which has recently produced four interesting editions. The music comes from the late classical and romantic periods and is not available in any form other than in original editions. Different from other publishers of similar works, Van Sambeek chose not to produce facsimiles; the pieces…
Piano wereld
Jan.-febr. 2006
Saved from oblivion
The more the piano developed, the more composers were challenged to explore the new possibilities of this instrument. Because of this, the large number of piano works written during the nineteenth century is all too obvious. From the perspective of our century it is easy to discern the greater masters from the lesser: the music…
Piano Bulletin (EPTA)
2008-1
Ignaz Moscheles – Tägliche Studien über die harmonisierten Skalen…
In the nineteenth century numerous books were published with technique exercises, usually based especially on scale figures. Technical studies of this sort were put on the market notably in the nineteenth century, and were characterized by containing many kinds of exercises with varying levels of difficulty. It is certain that those short elementary scale exercises à la Czerny for daily usage have hardly any artistic value. I don’t think it very likely that in our parts many teachers will bother their pupils with them. Opus 107 by Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870) would seem to belong in that category of skills exercises, if one goes by its title, which reads in full: Tägliche Studien über die harmonisierten Skalen zur Übung in den verschiedensten Rhytmen. Still, this is a horse of quite another colour…
NOTES
Volume 67, Number 2, December 2010
Nicholas Temperly University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
We still tend to understand the classical and romantic periods of music through the work of a handful of great composers. This series is a welcome effort to make available some of the neglected masterworks for the piano. It surely represents a labor of love on the part of its editor, Bart van Sambeek, and many pianists will be grateful to have access to so much unfamiliar material of high quality.
Piano Journal (EPTA)
2011-1
Ignaz Moscheles: Daily Studies on the Harmonic Scales for Practice in Various Rhythms, op.107
These masterful etudes for piano duet come in a superb new Urtext Edition by the firm of Van Sambeek who are alone in retrieving lost masterpieces …
Piano wereld
2011-5
Friedrich Kalkbrenner
VSE 05
Nowadays we mainly associate the name Friedrich Kalkbrenner with piano pedagogy. It is usually well known that he was also known as a great performing musician in his own time, but his compositions are rarely or never played. However, they provide a good impression of the elegant, graceful and moody salon music from Paris in the first half of the 19th century. Bart van Sambeek has collected a bouquet of four representative opus numbers and it is certainly worthwhile to play and study this music. The pieces are written in a very pianistic way and are also a good preliminary study for the music of Chopin (who dedicated his first piano concerto to Kalkbrenner): compare, for example, bars 139-147 from the Caprice with Chopin’s opus 10 no. 2.
Piano wereld
2011-5
Carl Czerny
VSE 04
Who says Czerny, says etudes. Although Czerny was a great pedagogue, with Franz Liszt probably his most famous student, his etudes often concentrate too much on the technical problem to be overcome. These compositions therefore lack harmonic inventiveness. The advantage may be that you can indeed concentrate purely on the technique, because the harmony does not require any attention. On the other hand, there is the disadvantage that you quickly become bored by this harmonic uniformity, with the result that you no longer concentrate on the technical problem.
Piano wereld
2011-5
Johann Baptist Cramer
VSE 09
I wrote earlier in this magazine about Cramer’s Trois sonatas opus 23 that the melodic and harmonic inventiveness were not the strongest assets of those compositions, the Trois sonatas opus 29 are on a higher level. In these works you can clearly hear that Beethoven was influenced by Cramer. Although the melodies are, for my taste, a few levels below Mozart and Beethoven, Cramer could certainly write a beautiful song, as in the middle movement of the second sonata.
Harpsichord & fortepiano
Volume 16. No.1
Van Sambeek Editions have given themselves the mandate to unearth forgotten works written by ‘piano composers of the late Classical and Romantic period who are unjustly scarcely known’. It has been succesfully demonstrated by the record company Hyperion’s extensive and celebrated survey of the Romantic Piano Concerto (to name one example), that there are many beautiful, imaginative, and wellcrafted works that have been undervalued over time because they were written by composers who have had the misfortune of being forsaken from the canon of composers…
Piano Bulletin (EPTA)
1999-3
J.B. Cramer
3 Sonates opus 23
Among pianists the London composer J.B. Cramer is mainly known for his etudes, which almost everyone has studied. These etudes already show that Cramer was a very skilled composer, who could also write creatively and melodiously within the straitjacket of the etude. In addition to his etides, the composer, originally from Germany, left behind an important and very extensive oevre (117 sonatas) for piano that has remained relatively unknown. Apparently he was too much in the shadow of his brilliant contemporaries Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.