The Lanner in the Stravinsky
It’s well known that Stravinsky borrowed tunes from Lanner for the ballerina in Petrushka. I knew about the Schönbrunner waltz Op. 200 , but I was pleased to find the…
A year of ballet playing cards #15: A rumpty-tumpty waltz (Oh! Oh! Antonio)
Get the piano score (free download) Read more about my Year of Ballet Playing Cards I like it when teachers set grands battements on what I call a rumpty-tumpty 3.…
A year of ballet playing cards #14: A small, medium and large waltz by Adam (Ah)
Download the score for free (pdf) Read more about my Year of Ballet Playing Cards “Do you have anything smaller?” Music, meter and small change Even though I haven’t used…
Confessions of an anxious ballet pianist day #8: The dreaded slow mazurka pirouette
The moment I see a teacher marking a pirouette that has a massive, sweeping balancé in it, I know there’s trouble ahead. Like the dreaded 2/4 sissonne of yesterday’s post,…
More on “truly triple meter” – are Chopin’s waltzes really mazurkas?
I’m not saying that Chopin couldn’t write a waltz, or that his embodied sense of waltzing was too fragile to be able to incorporate it in music. But I wonder…
More on the rareness of the truly triple waltz
In my last post, I said “Truly triple waltzes are an impossibility. They shouldn’t exist, and they don’t”. Less than 48 hours later, while I was playing Ich weiß nicht…