Customer Reviews

Bartók for Piano: A Survey of His Solo Literature

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This book is a complete survey of all of Bela Bartok's solo piano literature. For each piece (including every piece in Mikrokosmos), it includes detailed notes on the music and its background, playing tips, and ratings of technical and musical difficulty. The book also includes information about Bartok's musical notation and style. Not only are we told which music publishers have each piece in print, but it also includes complete descriptions of the available anthologies of Bartok's music.

The information provided by pianist David Yeomans is of very high quality, and I found his difficulty ratings, in particular, extremely accurate and helpful when selecting works for practice. This book is a must for anyone who loves to play Bartok's music, no matter what your level of playing ability.

Only the information on the recordings is out of date, but this is rendered moot by the fact that all of Bartok's solo piano works are available on CD in the excellent renditions by Gyorgy Sandor.