Big Marv, Sheila Jonsmithe - Beethoven Scherzo From Symphony No. 2 For Piano 4 Hands

 One afternoon after a meeting in our conference room here at Big And Tall Records, a group of us walked down the hall next to the recording studio and we heard the sound of someone playing the piano. We looked in the big window of the studio and saw Big Marv and his wife Sheila Jonsmithe sitting next to each other on the bench playing 4 hand piano music. Now we had no idea that Sheila played the piano, so we knocked on the door and let ourselves in the studio. They quickly stopped playing, but after some urging they continued. They were playing from a book of classical music arranged for 4 hand piano. We pulled up chairs and listened as they ran through pieces by Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, and Beethoven. It was interesting to see, as Sheila had took the Primo part, that is the upper part of the arrangements where most of the melody is. Big Marv was handling the accompaniment with his usual skill, and all of us there had the same thing in mind without saying a word we discovered later. We need to record some of these things for release!

We were especially impressed with the Scherzo from Symphony No.2 by Ludwig van Beethoven. The interplay between the performers was impressive, and it was this piece we decided to release. We don't know how well this will do, as we've never released a so-called classical music piece before, but we're willing to try. Big Marv tells us about the piece and their playing together:

Sheila and I have been playing piano 4 hand music since we first met. She's a classically trained pianist as well as singer, can sight-read anything you put in front of her and play it well the first time. She was in church choirs in her youth, and sometimes would work choir rehearsals as the pianist. Her main interest is cooking, preparing and the history of Cajun food specifically. She chose to not pursue music as a profession, but kept up her technique and singing abilities for her own pleasure. We change who plays the main part and who plays the accompaniment, and we like pieces like the Beethoven Scherzo because both players are involved in playing the themes of the music. 

Beethoven wrote the 2nd. Symphony in D Major in 1801-1802, and it was one of the final works from his first period. In earlier symphonies as in Mozart and Haydn, one of the 4 movements of a symphony was a minuet. But sometimes it was a minuet in name only, as both composers wrote movements that could have been called scherzos. Scherzo is Italian for joke, so a scherzo is markedly different from the original minuet, which was a slow, rather dignified dance. Beethoven did much to promote the change to scherzo in many of his works, even though sometimes he still labeled them  as minuet.

We have also embedded an orchestral performance of the Scherzo so the listener can hear the orchestral version as Beethoven wrote it. 4 hand piano music was very popular in the times before commercial recordings. Many homes had a piano with at least one person in the family that could play it.