Customer Reviews

Cello Solos EFS 40

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am an adult intermediate level cello student (appr. early HS equivalent). I bought this book for fun, and now my teacher assigns me a piece each week to work on. It is refreshing to actually work on lyrical solo pieces to take a break from the scales and etudes.

Although these seem like a break from the etudes, you still have lots of building and learning material here. They make shifting exercises fun for example.

Plus, it comes with a full piano accompaniement that is so useful for students to play with to check intonation.

My teacher also uses the book to play along on the cello for accompaniement for the same purpose (works really well for the Handel Largo since the bass line in the piano score functions as continuo part for a second cello). Great tunes from opera, symphony, etc. This is a fun book to play from.

One downside is the suggested fingerings. While most make sense, some are sort of silly in the goal to avoid the dreaded random open string. My teacher changes the fingerings when she assigns me a new piece. However, anyone on a level to play these pieces will recognize there are alternative fingerings and can adapt to their own use.

I like to play these arrangments with my teacher on the piano. THey are truly wonderful.

Please remember these are arrangments, so in some of the creations, you don't have the whole score.

Anyway, a very nice variety of traditional and classical music, in different levels to play.

The book is not recommended for someone who has just started to play cello, or only plays first position.

The Cello Solo book is good, but the cello part that is above the piano part is hard for me to read. My cello teacher said that I should have gotten a seperate cello part. That is the reason I was inquiring about the Cello book. I would like to get the seperate cello part

Basically, with the Amazon shipping, it came pretty fast and timely, which was decent; however, the music that was selected for this book was not really the music that I would have enjoyed playing. There are some, but they're transposed at weird clefs that kind of give a funky taste while trying to sight read it, which will be requiring a lot more time than needed to read it.
Also, for the song "Melody in F" by Rubinstein, there was a white patch on my copy, which led to an inconvenience. Though, of course, this is my own personal experience and it might conflict with other people's intake of the music perspective.