Pianist's Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature

Rating:
Summary: The Creme de la Creme!
Review: Amazing amount of information, great for teachers and performers! It grades the music from levels 1-10 so if your a teacher you can find the perfect song for your student. Explains all the required understanding of the performer and teaching tips for the piece. It's an invaluable resource for any pianist!

Rating:
Summary: Great book on solo literature for the piano
Review: As a music teacher, I found this book to be a perfect guide to the selection of piano literature from elementary through advanced repertoire. The coverage is comprehensive, representing four periods of music history. It's a pretty solid guide for the experienced piano instructor as well as an important handbook for thw beginning instructor. It is also a dependable sourcebook for the advancing piano student. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Good guide, but only for elementary instructor
Review: It's quite a good book of "teaching literature", but for me an advanced pianist, and as a guide to "performance literature", it is quite unsatisfactory. For instance, even Bach's English Suites are not mentioned in this book at all! Especially if you've read some piano liturature books like in German (eg. Handbuch der Klavierliteratur by K. Wolters), you would feel this book relatively inferior. But it provides good information for the piano instructors indeed, like which repertoire is a good preparative study for another repertoire, etc. Acutally I would still suggest this book, because it is sufficiently informative for the basic piano instructors in my country.

Rating:
Summary: Good guide, but only for elementary instructor
Review: It's quite a good book of "teaching literature", but for me an advanced pianist, and as a guide to "performance literature", it is quite unsatisfactory. For instance, even Bach's English Suites are not mentioned in this book at all! Especially if you've read some piano liturature books like in German (eg. Handbuch der Klavierliteratur by K. Wolters), you would feel this book relatively inferior. But it provides good information for the piano instructors indeed, like which repertoire is a good preparative study for another repertoire, etc. Acutally I would still suggest this book, because it is sufficiently informative for the basic piano instructors in my country.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for certain applications.
Review: This book would be particularly useful for piano teachers or for adult students of piano who are trying to expand their repertoire. It would be less useful for an advanced pianist (which I am not), as the rating scale is too simplistic and many well-known, but very difficult, works are not included.

There is a great selection of pieces from both well-known and very obscure composers, and includes virtually every significant teaching piece that one might think of. Each piece is graded in difficulty from 1-10. The grading is not as detailed as that used by Wolters, where each piece is given a separate grade for both technical and musical difficulty, but the grading is quite accurate and helpful in selecting pieces that you can actually play, if you're not a top-notch pianist. The biggest advantage of this book over other piano repertoire books is the very extensive coverage of twentieth-century music, including even some pieces for prepared piano, so it's a good place to look for some new stuff to play to annoy your friends and neighbors.

A minor weakness of the book is the lack of headings at the top of each page, which makes it sometimes irritating to use as a reference, since you may have to page forward or backwards several pages to figure out where you are in the alphabetical listing of composers. The typesetting and page layout make it look a bit amateurish, although it is carefully edited and doesn't contain a lot of typographical errors.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for certain applications.
Review: This book would be particularly useful for piano teachers or for adult students of piano who are trying to expand their repertoire. It would be less useful for an advanced pianist (which I am not), as the rating scale is too simplistic and many well-known, but very difficult, works are not included.

There is a great selection of pieces from both well-known and very obscure composers, and includes virtually every significant teaching piece that one might think of. Each piece is graded in difficulty from 1-10. The grading is not as detailed as that used by Wolters, where each piece is given a separate grade for both technical and musical difficulty, but the grading is quite accurate and helpful in selecting pieces that you can actually play, if you're not a top-notch pianist. The biggest advantage of this book over other piano repertoire books is the very extensive coverage of twentieth-century music, including even some pieces for prepared piano, so it's a good place to look for some new stuff to play to annoy your friends and neighbors.

A minor weakness of the book is the lack of headings at the top of each page, which makes it sometimes irritating to use as a reference, since you may have to page forward or backwards several pages to figure out where you are in the alphabetical listing of composers. The typesetting and page layout make it look a bit amateurish, although it is carefully edited and doesn't contain a lot of typographical errors.