Excellent compilation with thorough explanations

books:


	• Succeeding with the Masters, Romantic Era, Volume One Helen Marlais FJH Music Company, 2005 - 88 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Excellent compilation with thorough explanations

The author has put together an excellent compilation and guide. She explains the nuances of how to play the pieces -- nuances about dynamics and technique that would be easily overlooked by students on their own. She illustrates her explanations with music notation examples. The explanations and presentation are clear and near impossible to misunderstand. All of the explanatory material is presented on facing pages to the pieces themselves, inspiring confidence and smoothing out the learning. The book comes with a CD of the music, lists references the author used to compile and write this book, and includes a glossary of musical terms. Easily this is the best music series I've run across, and there are so many to choose from.

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Succeed with Hellen Marlais!

Great book! I wanted to start playing again for fun (Now that I'm not in school anymore, you can keep all those scales and Hanon excercises!) and definitely didn't want a method book but did want a way to start building a bit of repetoire and felt I might need a bit more support than I would get in a collection of piano music. I've been using this series all summer, and this book provides that support perfectly--the editor has done a great job of focusing on the one or two aspects of each piece that might require a bit more attention and gives clear instructions (with an option or two) on how to perform them well. The CD is also a Godsend for someone who doesn't have a teacher to model for them. The selection of pieces provides a lot of variety of styles (not boring!) while managing to meet the learning needs of a student at the same time--very few collections I've seen succcessfully manage that compromise.

If I made one suggestion for improvement, it might be nice to have a chart suggesting a difficulty level for each piece regardless of the composer (the pieces are arranged according to difficulty by composer). Still, that's a small complaint, and I have roughly figured it out by trial and error.

I've already bought the other two level-one books and when I'm done with them, will certainly move on to level two. Moreover, while I'm sure I'll start my own child off with Thompson or Shaum, as soon as he's ready (third grade or so), I'll definitely use these as supplements. If you're a self-taught student looking to expand your repetoire of "serious" music or a teacher looking for supplemental materials better than most of the crap out there, I'm not sure you could do better.

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Succeeding with the Masters, Romantic Era, Volume One, is a collection of graded repertoire featuring selections from Tchaikovsky, Schumann, and Schubert three great masters of the Romantic era. These works build a foundation for playing the more advanced repertoire of the Romantic era. Each piece is introduced by a short discovery of a particular characteristic of the Romantic era. Practice strategies guide the student in preparing and performing each piece. This comprehensive approach to learning style, technique, and historical context provides a valuable foundation for successful performance of all romantic repertoire pieces

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