Eleven Late String Quartets, Opp. 74, 76 and 77, Complete Review

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(More customer reviews)As a musicology student on a budget, I've acquired quite a few Dover scores over the last years. They may be slightly antiquated in many cases, but there's simply no one who can match their prices.

This book, though, represents Dover at their very finest. While the standardized set up for orchestral scores have changed vastly over the years, string quartets have basically remained unchanged since the conception of the form. The only "challenge", from a modern point of view, is reading the violas alto clef, which anyone interested in string quartets should be acquainted with in any case.

The print itself is among the best I've seen from Dover. The edition appears to be an enlarged miniature score, making it very comfortable to follow, and leaves plenty of space for writing notes/analyzes etc. The print itself is very nice, a lot better than my Op. 20 & 33 (Also from Dover), where each print appears to have random flaws that make some few notes almost unreadable. Unlike the 20/33 score, the paper in this score can heavy-handed use of rubbers without erasing any of the print, which of course is a huge plus for people who buy scores like this with the intention of analyzing pieces. (Please notice: This score was bought from a local violin store, where it probably had been sitting for years -at least the price I got it for suggested so-. The printing quality of newer versions MAY be different from this one, although I have no way of telling at the moment)

This print is an old Eulenburg edition, which are known for quality. I have only found one flaw that twarts Haydn's intentions in this edition: I know for a fact that Haydn never put dynamic markings in the variations movement in the Emperor quartet; while I can't say so for certain, it is likely to assume that this should be the case at least for some of the other movements in the book as well. This certainly isn't a big deal, but it does obscure part of Haydn's genius: In this case, he didn't need dynamic markings to bend the player to his will. The points where one should increase or decrease playing strength is embedded in the musical material, and he controls the string quartet to such a degree that different dynamics are never required to get the intended voice into the foreground. I've yet to find any misprints.

This, of course, isn't really a big deal. I suspect that the people who would want this book are people interested in following along with recording or performances, or people who intend to use it for analytical purposes. Naturally, I wouldn't recommend it for performance. The notes are large enough to be viewed at a distance, but it would require way more page turns than required, and these are often put at awkward places. I imagine that it would work well with PhotoScore or similar software though, so you could probably make single-instrument scores out of it with relative ease.

So, unless you want the latest scholarly urtext edition, or want separate parts, this is as good as it gets. At this price, it should be a no-brainer.

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Product Description:
This volume includes 11 string quartets in complete score - Haydn's last and best.Reprinted from the reliable modern Eulenburg edition.

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Piano Music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk: 26 Complete Pieces from Original Editions Review

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(More customer reviews)Gottschalk is a name few mention when talking about great composers, but he is equal to many who have much more name recognition.His virtuosity at the piano over-shadowed how good a composer he was.Calling him the "American Chopin" is not an exagerration.The book has some great works, but is missing a few of his masterpieces, namely "Radieuse', "La Scintilla" and the "Battle Cry of Freedom".

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Features 26 pieces (including covers) by early-19th-century American genius: "Bamboula," "The Banjo," other Creole, Negro-based material, through elegant salon music.

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Christmas Oratorio in Full Score Review

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(More customer reviews)Dover Publications full scores are a boon for music student and others on a budget: Being reprints of old editions free of copyright, they represent the very best value-for-money on the market, even though the newest Urtext scholarship may not be present in them. Most of them are very readable, and indeed holds a high enough quality for anyone.

This publication, however, has a few problems. First of all, the print quality of Dover scores seems to be variable, and this is one of the worse ones. While the note heads themselves are very large and visible, the stems are often halfway removed (in general, the paper quality isn't as good as in most of my other Dover scores, a major point for those of us who like to make notes in our scores). In this music, you can probably predict a note value with reasonable accuracy, but it's still a bit annoying. This edition is a copy of a print from 1856 (just a couple of decades after Mendelssohns famed "rediscovery" of Bach), which not only is very old even for a Dover score, but it also means that quite a few old fashioned idioms are present. First of all, C clefs are used by soprano, alto and tenor, which may pose a problem for some. Another thing entirely is the fact that the edition was printed a century before the period style movement gained any hold, which means that the instrumentation as given in this edition is what would be used in a 19th century performance of the oratorio. Although they have been faithfull when it comes to using archaic oboes (oboe d'amore and oboe d'caccia). The trumpets are, however, assigned to then modern instruments.

The worst part about this score, however, is the fact that while instrumentation varies for each movement, the names of each instrument playing is only mentioned at the beginning of each movement; you'll have to remember for yourself after that. To make matters worse, no bar numbers are added. These kinds of things annoy me quite a bit, as it would have been a very small job for Dover to fix these points, and it would make these scores a lot more practical.

Still, it is a score of an amazing piece of music, it's cheap, and I've yet to find any errors in the music itself. So I would definitely recommend it, but there is at the same time room for improvement.

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Product Description:
First produced in Leipzig in 1734-35, Bach's Christmas Oratorio unfolds in a set of six cantatas unified by a Biblical narrative relating the story of the birth of Christ. This masterpiece of sacred music, for centuries a favorite of concert audiences and church congregations throughout the Christmas season, has been reproduced directly from the authoritative Bach-Gesellschaft edition published by Breitkopf & Härtel of Leipzig.

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