Category: Piano

This is an amateur performance of one of the more difficult pieces I’ve ever attempted. Prokofiev let his true feelings about Stalin spill into his three “War Sonatas,” nos. 6-8, written in 1942. The war sonatas are tumultuous, chromatic, and dissonant. The finale to no. 7, the “Precipitato,” is a relentless tocatta in septuple time.…

Piano composition for 4 hands with jazz influences. Sheet music free to download with link below.

The 30 Goldberg variations run long for most listeners, and are a large project to learn. So here’s a short version of just the first set of 3 plus the beautiful aria which is the basis for the variations.

A habanera (literally “music or dance of Havana”) by Claude Debussey written in his impressionistic style. A very beautiful and atmospheric piece.

First performed by Sergei Prokofiev in 1909, this piece earned him his place as a leftist and “bad boy of Russian music.” It is from his Four Pieces, opus. 4, no. 4. After a demonic start, it becomes sheer terror, and is now considered a modern masterpiece. Great fun to play.

This piece is already short, so I didn’t make any changes to it. A favorite along with Cmin nocturne.

A favorite of Chopin’s Ballades that I once worked on, but it has some very difficult sections for the amateur pianist. I came back to this piece and created a shortened version of it that required one new transition section and a new ending. It was great fun to work on and play as I…

I shortened this from 20 minutes (plus or minus a few minutes depending on the performer) to 8 minutes. The details of shortening the piece are described after the video. In this arrangement, I play through measure 111, then jump to measure 122 (in the first ending). I play through measure 124, and then jump…

This is an arrangement of Glass’ Etude No. 3 that is exciting and great fun to play. I very much like the chromatic and harmonic movement in sections of the piece, and this arrangement captures my favorite sections in a short piece. Unfortunately, due to copyright restrictions I am unable to record the arrangement for…

This is a stride piano classic from the early 20th c. that I’m adding to the blogs for fun and variety. I didn’t find sheet music for this at the time I worked on learning it, so just had to “wing it” by ear.