I have been really into listening to piano music for the last little bit of time. My taste is wide ranging, Jazz, Rock, Blues, Classical, as long as it features piano I am digging it. So I thought, in the name of helping me find new music to listen to, we could compile a list of great piano pieces.
I’ll start us off with a couple of things that I have been listening to a lot recently:
Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto #1
So there’s a start. What else belongs on the list of great piano music?
Anything by Thelonious Monk.
Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor.
Scriabin’s sonatas.
Beethoven’s sonatas and concertos.
Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand.
The Nice’s cover of Tim Hardin’s “Hang on to a Dream” (live version from Elegy).
And for something completely out of left field, the player piano music of Conlon Nancarrow.
Keith Jarrett - All The Things You Are
Caravan - MICHEL PETRUCCIANI solo live
Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 2.
Or, hell, anything by Rachmaninoff.
rachmaninoff - rhapsody on the theme of paganini (last third of it)
rachmaninoff - piano concerto no 3
rachmaninoff - piano concerto no 2
rachmaninoff - etudes-tableaux op 33 & 39
Two things to contribute -
Vladimir Horowitz plays Chopin, Ballade #1 in g minor, Op. 23
Luckey Roberts plays Railroad Blues. Luckey is the tall guy on the left in the photo.
Chopin, Fantasy Impromptu in C# minor. Apparently the composer hated it, but he’s in a minority of one there I think.
Just wanted to clarify - they are called GRAND pianos.
Four of my favorites:
Ravel’s Ondine (an ondine is a water fairy)
Ravel’s 2nd movement from his Piano Concerto in G Major
Debussy’s “Lent (mélancolique et doux)” (from “Images oubliées”)
Debussy’s Passepied from his “Suite Bergamasque”
Yes, even this is worth the watching.
Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca isn’t deep, but it is absurdly catchy.
For pure piano genius, it’s hard to beat Beethoven’s sonatas.
On the poppier side, piano features prominently in some of Madness’s songs (like Disappear and Shut Up).
Keith Jarrett - The Koln Concert
Glenn Gould’s recording of The Goldberg Variations is nice.
Fond of most of Scott Joplin myself.
Any thing from Tord Gustavsen’s album The Ground. Good luck finding it though. I haven’t seen it anywhere but the library.
“Conversations with Myself” – Bill Evans
…along with just about everything he’s ever done!
I have been going through the related clips of that Horowitz concert for the last hour or so, and they are amazing. I have never actually seen him play before though I have a couple of recordings that he did. I have never seen playing that fluid before in my life. It’s like he doesn’t even have to press the keys, they just melt under his hands.