Mac'nClassicalCheese - Jul 20, 2023

Welcome back! It's season 2 and like last season, I'm kicking off the show with some of my favorite pieces. This time, it's all solo piano though! This is the first of what will likely be many Piano Palooza's because there are SO many amazing works for solo piano to enjoy. Unlike any other instrument, a piano can play a piece without any accompaniment and it still sounds so full. The instrument allows for a lot of resonance that most other instruments cannot carry off or sustain throughout a whole piece, and the pianist's ability to play multiple voices at once with both hands lets you write complex pieces with many layers. This Piano Palooza is mainly pieces from the Romantic Era of classical music (so late 1800s, early 1900s) with 2 small exceptions – Mozart & Beethoven – because their selected pieces fit in with the type of pieces I chose for the show, which were fantasies/romances/impromptus. All of these types of music indicate a breaking away from standard form. This means the pieces are much more free, complex sounding, and beautiful. You'll see that the Rachmaninoff and Scriabin pieces don't have these titles, but that's because they were active late enough in the 1900s that most forms had already been broken down.