SKU: BO.B.3688

This book proposes a way to start the girls and boys from five yeras old to study the piano. Through the characters of the short stories, that head each piece on the form of a little poem, we work in a fun way, exploring the various possibilities of sound, timbre and register of the instrument. From the first contact, the piano is displayed with all its full expression.

At first, these scores have been designed to provide memory reference points on order to focus all the attention on what happens on the keyboard. Thus, the identification of groups and patterns of notes -often illustrated with cartoons and a short analysis of the formal structure, sometimes referred to in the opening poem- may be one of the first approaches the student has to the complexity of musical abstraction. Therefore, the use of the score is also an invitation to discover musical language intuitively.

The organization of material is also designed so that its contents can be played, in part or in full, in auditions and concerts. Students can recite the poems before playing the pieces and even perform dressed up. Thus, from the elegant leap of a dolphin to the small steps of a mouse, we imagine the rapid jump of a flea trapeze artist or the rhythmic sound of a train. From the sounds we hear in a haunted house, we will add a touch of the magic wand and learn to accurately enter pinches of ingredients for a potion….

SKU: BO.B.3662

The Sonatas de Paris are divided into two books. Comellas began the series in early 1952 and they were finished in 1955. As with most of his works, he composed without having a plan to premier them or a commission. So upon having them completed, he filed them away. On many occasions, his close friend Jordi Giro would read thrue the pieces or Anna Ricci would sing his songs, but very little of his music was performed during his life time.

The two books entitled Sonatas de Paris are really to books with totally different character. The first book is made up of short piano pieces in a neo baroque style. More than following strict forms of the baroque suite, the pieces are more a evoking of the baroque style. Book one loosely follows the idea of a suite or ordre, where as book two is much freer in structure being made up of various pieces, a few in memory of his favored composers (Albeniz, Debussy, and Granados) ending with a group of four dances, Las indias danzantes [Dances of the Indian girls], that refer to an Indian dance. This group of dances is not really playable by one pianist and seems to be really meant to be performed piano 4 hands, but since there is no note about this in the score it is hard to say. A few of these pieces were performed by Rosa Sabater in Paris in 1980.

The present edition is based on manuscripts that are in the Joan Comellas deposit in the National Catalonian Library in Barcelona.