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.
