Piano Concerto No. 1 & No. 2 (With Orchestral Reduction)

Rating:
Summary: 2 Great Russian Concertos
Review: A must to an aspiring virtuoso's repertoire. Rachmaninoff was the peak of piano style and complexity, his first big hit being the second piano concerto. Tchaikovsky wrote a magnificent virtuosic piano concerto included in this book. You can hear the opening bars almost anywhere even today. From the lengthy, intimidating cadenza of the first movement, to the last over-hand octave run, it is a beatiful piece of piano literature. If you are serious about the piano, you must have this volume.

Rating:
Summary: Very bare edition of two great complex concertos.
Review: The music is fantastic, being the most popular concerto repertoire of Russian origin, but the edition assumes the reader some sort of Russian professional. Right away one notices that there are very few fingerings noted, and altogether I have found maybe one editor's note on execution in the entirety of the two concertos. The edition contains no introduction to the music, no informative synopsis of any sort, no helpful background history on the composer's methods, reasonings or motivation for the music to aid the interpreter, nothing at all, in fact, but the notes themselves. Not even a photograph of Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky to identify the name with. This lack of support for the performer is considerably below the standards of any serious edition. Unless one is well-prepared with some amount of collected knowledge of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, and with the experience of having listened to each of these concertos, the edition will leave you stranded. But, then again, it is great music one must have.