Prokofiev: Complete Transcriptions for Piano (2007)

Prokofiev was nothing if not a practical musician, and he was proficient at getting the maximum mileage out of his music whenever possible. The fact that he was an expert pianist made it possible for him to create wonderfully idiomatic, and often virtuosic, transcriptions of his orchestral works. The most likely candidates for transcriptions were the numbers from his ballets and operas, which were complete, discrete pieces that would fit very nicely together as piano suites. The work he mined most thoroughly was his ballet ... Read More

Prokofiev was nothing if not a practical musician, and he was proficient at getting the maximum mileage out of his music whenever possible. The fact that he was an expert pianist made it possible for him to create wonderfully idiomatic, and often virtuosic, transcriptions of his orchestral works. The most likely candidates for transcriptions were the numbers from his ballets and operas, which were complete, discrete pieces that would fit very nicely together as piano suites. The work he mined most thoroughly was his ballet Cinderella, from which he extracted three suites for piano, with a total of 19 selections. His single suite from Romeo and Juliet contains 10 movements. His most famous transcription, the March and Scherzo from The Love for Three Oranges is one of his most popular keyboard works. The remaining works include a waltz from the opera War and Peace, and dances from his incidental music for Hamlet and his film score Lermontov. The CD also includes Prokofiev's transcriptions of music by... Read Less