Dreamaurora's Piano Repertoire Exploration
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For today, we have a famous Handel piece and another Japanese composition.
1. Air in F from the 'Water Music' by George Frideric Handel
Pianists will be familiar with the Air from the Harmonious Blacksmith, but for most other people the Air from 'Water Music' would be the one that they know of. Featured here is Handel's own keyboard arrangement of the Air, which to my knowledge is the only movement from 'Water Music' that he made arrangement of, so it had to have been really popular. Not an easy piece to pull off despite sounding rather simple due to numerous florid ornamentations and careful voicing required here; this piece was set as an Grade 5 ABRSM A piece in 2001.
From Handel's Selected Keyboard Works Book 1 ed. Richard Jones. Published by ABRSM Publishing. Grade 5 ABRSM.
Note: The dotted rhythms are swung as triplets as recommended by Richard Jones in the ABRSM edition of this book. All ornamentation realisations performed in this video also follow those suggested in the edition.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS0MABJoApA][/youtube]
2. Our Land by Karen Tanaka
Karen Tanaka's compositions are featured in a couple of Spectrum compilations and her pieces had been featured as ABRSM exam pieces before, so she's not exactly obscure to the West. But her majority of compositions are for children and published only in Japan. This piece 'Our Land' is from the book 'Our Planet Earth', one of her piano compilations for children. Beautiful, but technically quite challenging to voice all the chords correctly.
From Our Planet Earth by Karen Tanaka. Published by Edition Kawai. Grade 5-6 ABRSM. Score available from Amazon Japan.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvcQ0U-s9cs][/youtube]