Being a piano player may seem like a very solitary way to go about learning an instrument. As a piano student, you may yearn to make music with others, you may have extended your piano training to accompany some of your friends for concerts or exams, or explored the wide variety of chamber music repertoire available involving the piano. However, had you considered the sheer quantity of orchestral music that requires a piano, aside from the obvious concerto repertoire?
Orchestral Works with Piano
Your piano training to date has no doubt included not just standard scales and finger exercises, but solo piano repertoire as well, from stand-alone pieces to complete sonatas. For more advanced students, your teacher may have introduced transcriptions of famous symphonic works for you to play together as duet material. However, many late romantic and twentieth century orchestral works employ the piano as an intruse to in its own right place.
A famous example is the last movement of Saint-Saenz Symphony No.3 (also known as the “Organ Symphony”), where the piano adds colour to the string statement of the main motif. In the clip below, your can clearly see the positioning of the piano in the orchestra.
It's important to familiarize yourself with other orchestral keyboard instrument, too; Celeste parts are very common, for example. Many Prokofiev symphonies have a prominent piano part, and the increasingly popular symphonies of Bohuslav Martinu all require an orchestral pianist.
In next month, I will discuss more about what to study to become an orchestral pianist, thank you!!
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