SKU: FG.55011-372-5

ISBN 9790550113725.

Images of the sea figure prominently throughout my life and memories: from holidays on the Atlantic coast during my Canadian childhood to my current Baltic home, and the imagined, only later experienced Mediterranean of my ancestral heritage. As an immigrant (son of an immigrant) bound to two northern countries, the sea is emblematic of my twin homelands, from the expanses of water surrounding them to those separating them. A Mari usque ad Mare. The sea is also an enduring image of the unknown, of expanses unexplored, of the raw power of nature and, for too many currently, of terror holding a hope of refuge - or the pain of loss.
Such disparate ideas were captured for me in the seascapes of the New York painter MaryBeth Thielhelm, whom I met in 2008 during a residency on the Gulf of Mexico. Her vast, abstract, nearly monochromatic depictions of imaginary seas in wildly varying moods were the catalyst for a concerto where the piano is frequently far from a hero battling a collective, but rather acts as a channel for elemental forces surging up from the orchestra, floating - sometimes barely so - on its constantly shifting surface. There are few themes to speak of, beyond a handful of iconic ideas that periodically cycle upward. Rather, the piano's material is largely an ornamentation of the more primal rhythmic and harmonic impulses from the orchestra below - a poetic interpretation, if you will, of the more immediate experience of facing the vastness of some unknown body of water.
The title Nameless Seas is borrowed from one of Thielhelm's exhibitions, as are those of the four movements, which are bridged together into two halves of roughly equal weight - one rhapsodic and free, the other more single-minded and direct, separated only by a short breath. The opening movement, Nocturne, is predominantly calm, if brooding, darkness and light alternating throughout. Lyrical arabesques sparkle over gently lapping cross-currents in the strings and mirrored timpani, the piano's full power only rarely deployed. The waves gradually build, drawing in the full orchestra for a meeting of forces in Land and Sea, a brighter, more warmly lyrical scene that unfolds in series of dreamlike, sometimes even nostalgic visions, which for me carry strong memories of sitting on rocks above surging Atlantic waves. The third movement, Wake, is a fast, perpetual-motion texture of glinting, darting rhythms and sudden shafts of light, with a prominent part for the steel drums, limning the piano's quicksilver figurations. An ecstatic climax crashes into a solo cadenza that grows progressively calmer and more introspective rather than virtuosic. Much of the tension finally releases into Unclaimed Waters, a drifting, meditative seascape in which the piano is progressively engulfed by a series of ever-taller waves, ultimately dissolving into a tolling, rippling continuum of sound.
It has been a great privilege to realize such a long-held dream as this piece, and to write it for not one, but two great pianists. Risto-Matti Marin and Angela Hewitt, both of whose friendship and support have been unfailing and humbling, share the dedication. Nameless Seas was commissioned by the PianoEspoo festival and Canada's National Arts Centre, with the premieres in Ottawa and Helsinki led by Hannu Lintu and Olari Elts. Thanks are due also to the Jenny and Antti Wihuri fund, whose generous grant provided me with much-needed time, and Escape to Create in Seaside, Florida, the source to which I returned to do a large part of the work.

SKU: HL.49011963

ISBN 9783795793197. UPC: 073999799019. 10.0x13.25x1.268 inches.

Schumann's Piano Concerto is known all over the world, yet despite its popularity it remains in a certain sense an undiscovered work. The aim with this edition is not only to provide a critical score of the work, but at the same time to indicate what questions of detail should form the focus of future research. The critical analysis offered here thus offers discussion of the relationship between the one-movement Fantasia version and the three-movement concerto version, the problem of the transition from the second to the third movement and a series of questions relating to the version completed in 1853. A booklet of facsimiles completes the volume.

SKU: BR.PB-14560

The piano reduction and the study score (,,Studien-Edition) are available at G. Henle Verlag.

ISBN 9790004211014. 10 x 12.5 inches.

Beethoven's autographs of the first three piano concertos opp. 15, 19 and 37 are the earliest of all orchestral scores which have survived integrally. Thanks to source studies, we know today that a first version of the Concerto in Bb major op. 19 had already originated in Bonn in 1790 at the latest. It was followed by a second version written in Vienna most likely in 1793 which included the Rondo in Bb major WoO 6 as finale. A third version followed most probably in 1794 and led to the fourth and final version, written in Prague in October 1798, as Beethoven sojourned there at the beginning of the concert season. (from the Preface)This autograph together with the autograph solo part which was made at the beginning of 1801 and the parts printed in the same year, are the main sources of the present edition.

SKU: BR.EB-10859

ISBN 9790201808598. 9.5 x 12 inches.

After achieving sensational success with the musical Lady, be good! , with evergreens such as Fascinating Rhythm and The Man I love, as well as with his Rhapsody in Blue , Gershwin premiered his Concerto in F for piano and orchestra as a soloist at Carnegie Hall in 1925. Now, the new superstar of Broadway had also arrived at the center of New York's classical music scene. In its eventful history, the work went through numerous changes, cuttings, arrangements, many of which doubtful and unauthorized. Even the first and so far only printed orchestral score, edited by Frank Campbell-Watson, published in 1942 five years after Gershwin's death, contains many unauthorized interventions. Through years of research, editor Norbert Gertsch has succeeded in ridding the work of all unauthorized additions and alterations and thus reconstructing an Urtext in its original literal sense from the complex source material - from autograph sketches to early recordings. The first text-critical edition of the work is a joint production of Breitkopf (score/orchestral parts) and G. Henle Verlag (piano reduction).