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I'm using MuseScore, with their MuseSounds library, which supposedly is also sampled from real instruments. It's still a lot better than my earlier stuff before I switched to MuseScore - I am considering remastering some of those older transcriptions at some point. I don't have the budget for any of the commercial products at this time. VSL does not appear to be compatible with MuseScore from a quick search. People have suggested other sound libraries that are, but every one I've tried sounds even worse. Took a look at your channel to see if we've covered any of the same ground, but nothing stood out. I'm focused pretty much on piano (and other keyboard) concertos, whereas you have a lot of other stuff on there, mostly focused on your namesake it would seem? I did see a lot of Michael Haydn's pieces there, at least one of which made it into my playlists (the harpsichord & viola concerto, MH.41). I'm still trying to track down a few of Joseph Haydn's concerti - #5 and #12, as well as several of the un-numbered ones have yet to turn up in my searches. I have to assume recordings exist, because works by famous composers like him almost always do, though many of them later turn out to be false attributions.

...Is this some sort of code?

Yeah, I thought about doing more tempo adjustments in the 3rd movement, like each variation would be its own tempo. Certainly I slowed it down considerably for the 7th. I may just have been rushing it because the piece is so long as it is. We could maybe add another 5 minutes by slowing down some of the variations. (At least the solo parts - the orchestra repeats the main theme after each of the solo parts for the first 5 variations, and that should probably stay consistent.) The Kreutzer is not on YT that I know of, but it is on the MuseScore site. Here's the first movement (of 4): musescore.com/user/32178370/scores/5574040 The rest are all there, as well as some other of his works. I personally loved the first movement of the concerto, and the finale is okay, but I did not care for the 2 middle movements at all. I suspect it may be a case of things the computer just can't do very well.

Thanks for listening. (I had to look up what that meant, I read it as "galling", but aside from the length there's nothing too difficult about this piece. That or something to do with strong winds, which makes even less sense. Took some searching to realize it's Filipino. Greetings to the Philippines.)

Likewise for me. Since it was a viewer request, I probably would never have known had I not started this channel, so I definitely want to encourage more people to make such suggestions. This project is as much about learning for me as it is bringing these forgotten works to the attention of everyone else.

Thanks for listening. I'll keep them coming. On the one hand, it's sad there's so much good stuff out there that doesn't get played. But on the other hand, it means there's always more to discover.

Thanks should also go to @miguelulises3558 for suggesting this piece, as it's unlikely I'd have heard about this one on my own. It's a shame the composer died so young, or we might've had another Chopin. (Not saying this quite rises to that level, of course, but it shows the potential.)

Also I was thinking about requesting the piano concerto op 63 of Jean Henri Ravina, but for now I only found a piano solo arrangement. I searched for a long time only because he is my favorite composer,

Well, let me know if you ever find it. I see the same solo arrangement on IMSLP, but there's not much I can do with that. He's recent enough that there's a good chance it exists only in private collections, even though it should be public domain by now, but it might be out there somewhere.

@@Darrel_Hoffman I searched the complete score or an arrangement for 2 pianos for approximately a year and still not found it, I searched in so mush libraries that I lose the counting, but I will search again because now I have more Libraries to explore!

That's exactly what inspired me to start this channel. I sincerely hope that these videos will get the attention of someone who can arrange to create real recordings so that we can hear them the way they were meant to be heard.

Thanks for listening. So little is known about Nicolay that I don't know if he wrote any more than the two concertos I've transcribed - IMSLP has a small handful of other works but no other concertos. Some near-contemporaries of his are coming soon though.

I only wish I could hear it on a genuine period instrument, as this was clearly written for an instrument with features not found on modern pianos (and probably rare even in its time). I had to guess on what that "lute pedal" would sound like.

That's what I'm here for. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening. I wasn't sure this one would be a hit, given the number of negative opinions I read about the guy in some places. It might not be the most groundbreaking piece for its time, but it's definitely got its moments.

I believe you are referring to the so-called "Janissary pedal", seen here playing the very piece you mentioned: th-cam.com/video/JuhSAbQPk7E/w-d-xo.html That is another thing I just learned about in researching this piece, and now I kind of want one. But I think that works a bit differently? As I understand it, this pedal just directly operates a cymbal- or triangle-like device separate from the keys rather than altering the sound of the keys themselves. I might be wrong on that, but it seems like the player is able to make the cymbal crash sound occur only at certain times and not on every keystroke, the way the lute pedal or mandolin rail would.

@@Darrel_Hoffman THX much: I did not know about the actual name of that pedal. And, ok, gotcha! I understood the different mechanism! Thanks for that!

@@Darrel_Hoffman btw funny story but Taskin is a .... Turkish name 😃so in this case he could have used the Janissary pedal in place of Lute pedal to pay a homage to their heritage!

Don't know much his about background, but his uncle was born in the Holy Roman Empire, in what is now Belgium. Given that Henri-Joseph worked in his uncle's shop which manufactured harpsichords and pianos, I have to assume this was written for one of their own instruments. I'm not sure if any of them were equipped with BOTH Janissary and Lute pedals, though it's certainly possible. I'm not sure if it would fit the style of this piece though. It would however be quite appropriate for the one I'm working on now for next week (by Polish composer Emil Smietanski). The middle movement has some nice percussion going on (timpani and triangle), though that would of course be performed by other musicians, not the soloist. But I guess if you had a Janissary-equipped piano, you could tell your triangle player to stay home, as their services would no longer be needed.

There is a bit of a "fantasia" quality to it in the way that it jumps around between themes in the beginning (though it's not nearly as disjointed as, say, the Thurner concerto I did a few weeks ago.) But it eventually gets to the "point" about a third of the way through the movement and mostly stays consistent after that. If you're looking for other contemporary English composers to compare to, I'd recommend William Sterndale Bennett and Charles Villers Stanford, both of whom wrote a number of concertos around the same time period. I think they've all been recorded, so you won't find them on this channel (except in my playlists - Bennett for sure is in there, Stanford will be if I ever get around to finishing the S-Z playlist). But they're easy enough to find.

@@Darrel_Hoffman -- Rare gem....barely discovered.....BRAVO from Acapulco!

Thanks for listening, and greetings to Mexico. I'd love to find something by a Mexican composer to work on, or anywhere else in Latin or South America - I've generally enjoyed the few classical pieces I've heard from that part of the world. Unfortunately, nearly all the ones I know of are too recent to be in the public domain. And Mexico in particular has the strictest laws on that for some reason (it's composer's death +100 years, vs. +75 in most of the rest of the world.) If you have any suggestions, I'd like to hear it.

Yes, for me the ideal concert lineup would be a mix of all three - a famous piece by Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Rachmaninov, etc. to draw the crowds, something modern to give new composers exposure, and something long forgotten like the works I've been featuring. It seems that orchestras, much like radio stations, have long succumbed to the "Top 40" mentality that began with pop music, and sadly now exists with classical as well. Side note, I just noticed your name - are you by any chance related to a composer named Christoph(e) Beck? Either one - there's a modern Canadian composer Christophe Beck who is mostly known for film scores, notably several prominent Disney properties) and German composer Christoph Friedrich Beck (1758-1832) whose concerto was actually the first one I transcribed on this channel. I was trying to figure out if those two were related.

@@Darrel_Hoffman No, sadly not related to either of them. I only recently became aware of the earlier Christoph through your version of one of his piano concertos. There is a bit more available from Franz Ignaz Beck, also a classical period composer, but I haven't found much of any great excitement there, that I could see. Yes, I agree that it's nice that modern composers get some sort of airing, but, on the whole, I don't think they really care too much about what the general audience thinks - they long ago crept into their own little dilettante world - so as long as the new style works aren't too preponderant in any concert program, it's fine. Expanding the MASSIVE range of older works, which certainly DO (or COULD) have audience appeal, would be a greater service to music, I think, because I do sense some degree of boredom among concert goers where I am, and there's just too much wonderful music which is badly neglected.

I agree that a lot of modern stuff sounds like someone just recorded their cat running up and down the keyboard, but there definitely are some modern composers who write stuff that is also pleasant to listen to. Most of the really good ones seem to end up writing film scores because that's where the money is these days for that style of music. There's still a lot of good stuff being written in classical/romantic style that never makes it to the concert halls. Many of them self-publish here on TH-cam, or Bandcamp, SoundCloud and the like. Of course it's usually simulated performances like mine because it's hard to get a real orchestra interested in lesser-known composers, whether old or new, for reasons stated above.

I think "joie de vivre" might apply more to the 3rd concerto? I certainly enjoyed this one more, but as I've said, I always prefer the minor keys. I do wish I could find his other 4 concertos - there are keyboard solo parts on IMSLP for the first two, but nothing for #5 or #6.

Thanks for listening - and for reading the disclaimer and understanding the purpose of this channel. I don't get it when people complain that it's synthesized. If there were real recordings available, I wouldn't be doing these, and when I learn about them after the fact I link them prominently in the description. (Only happened once so far, on the Herz #5...)

Can you point me to a link for that? All I can find are references to Finale, another music entry program which is well outside my budget (which is basically 0 - I make no money from this yet. Maybe when I get enough subscribers that they start paying me it's an option. I could look into Patreon or something, but that's a whole other can of worms.) There's plenty of comparisons between MuseScore and Finale, instructions on how to import from one into the other, etc. But no "finale version" of MuseScore comes up. This link shows several other sound fonts: musescore.org/en/handbook/3/soundfonts-and-sfz-files#list But Finale is not one of them.

I think that he talks about the ladt version of musescore

Oh, so you're thinking it's "final" rather than "finale"? (To me that'd imply there won't be any further patches, but I suspect there might be something lost in translation here.) I was thinking there might be some way to use Finale's soundfont in MuseScore or something. I am in fact using the latest version of MuseScore, but I'm just using the provided MuseSounds font with it. I could look into some others. I'm not sure how much of an improvement that'd be, but you could get into serious analysis-paralysis looking at all the different options. Someone else suggested the "Aegean Symphony Orchestra" soundfont, which I've downloaded, but haven't figured out how to install yet. (I haven't really tried yet, I imagine it's not that difficult.)

Ugh, forget Aegean Symphony Orchestra. I did figure out how to install it but it sounds terrible compared to the MuseSounds instruments. It's like a $20 Casio keyboard from the 90's. Edit: Sorry, didn't notice that was you that suggested it before. But yeah, it was not good at all. Maybe there's some hidden settings that make it sound less synthy, but out of the box it was worse than what I was getting from Mozart before I switched to MuseScore.

The joke works better with Ludvig Schytte, or maybe Alfred Schnittke. Or Aloys Schmitt I guess; I did one of his a few months ago.

This is definitely a favorite among the ones I've transcribed. I don't know much about his other works, but I would like to find his first concerto as well.

@@Darrel_Hoffman I recommend you to hear his carnival mignon, very good selection of pieces.

I am relatively certain that Nicolay would've heard the works of Mozart, so it's quite likely he was influenced by them. If nothing else, they were both familiar with J.C. Bach, who wrote the sonatas on which Mozart's earliest concertos were based (the ones you have to look for - as much as Mozart's middle and later concertos are beloved, hardly anyone seems to play the first 5 all that much).

Most of that is due to repeats, I think. You don't see repeats much in later concertos. The same material might come up more than once, but generally with different orchestration or other alterations. I'm not sure if these are actually that long for the time. The modern form of a piano concerto was pretty well established by Mozart, who wrote most of his around this time, and they're relatively comparable in length. There were certainly concertos prior to Mozart, but the earlier ones from the likes of Haydn or the Bach family are clearly another beast, most of them being only 2 movements, with fewer instruments and much shorter run-times.

Thanks. If I were to do this again, I might clean up some of the ornamentations. This was one of my first times using MuseScore, so I just used the built-in ornaments as written, but sometimes I think they are not interpreted correctly. In particular, the turns all seem to come in a bit early - it doesn't have support for a turn between notes instead of directly on a note. I've since learned to interpret these things explicitly instead of relying on the built-in ornaments.

I am in fact using MuseScore's "MuseSounds" soundfont, as I have been since the Kleeberg several months ago. I haven't looked at the Aegean or any other soundfonts. Not sure how much of a difference it makes? I could try it out if I can figure out how to install it, I'm kind of new to MuseScore.

Or you can use muse hub for the enhancement of the sound quality. Also I may wish hat someday can be a recording of the concerts of Anton Simon, Henri Ravina and Emil Smietański (this is available on te website of polish music sources)

Well, this is weird. When I search for either Anton Simon or Henri Ravina on their site, it just gives me a bunch of stuff by Chopin. While I love Chopin, I doubt there's anything of his that hasn't been recorded dozens of times. I did find the Smietański one, as you saw in the other thread, so that's added to the queue.

@@Darrel_Hoffman The Anton Simom piano concerto Op 19 Has been recorded but now isnt available.

Also The ravinas one, but i only find a very weak referrence that this concerto was recorded.

Kalkbrenner's 1st has been recorded: th-cam.com/video/CclQ1tGmGws/w-d-xo.html His 2nd and 4th are also available. His 3rd concerto and double concerto for 2 pianos I haven't found recordings for, though I don't have orchestral parts available for them, only the soloist(s). (I understand a recording of the 3rd exists, but I didn't find it last time I looked.) Mathieu's 3rd also exists: th-cam.com/video/-AfbEEUX5B8/w-d-xo.html There are also recordings of his 2nd and 4th concertos. I haven't found either recording or score of his 1st.

Also I have a very large list of concertos that I will like to hear, as Mathieu 1st.

I have my own catalog of over 3000 concertos which I have found on TH-cam (and a few elsewhere), which is how I knew about the Kalkbrenner and Mathieu concertos. I have most of those in my playlists if you want to look through those. As a general rule, I will not do transcriptions if a recording exists, as no simulation will be as good as a real performance. I have nothing on Mathieu's 1st unfortunately. And now that I look, Mathieu is also too recent to be in the public domain. The rule as I understand it is 70+ years after the death of the composer, and 95+ years after publication, so anything published after 1929 or by a composer who was still alive in 1955 is not legally available yet (in the US; the rules vary by country, but TH-cam is a US company, which is what counts for this). Mathieu lived from 1929-1968 so that would apply to his entire oeuvre until at least 2038, and possibly as late as 2063. Kalkbrenner's double concerto is fair game if anyone can find the orchestra parts. I've personally played his first 3 (privately, sans orchestra), and quite liked them. Or if you have any other specific suggestions I'm open to them, just keep the public domain and no-existing-recording rules in mind.

Yes I have a sugestion, the concerto of Emil śmietanki, a friend of Brahms. The complete Score Is available on Polish music sources website.

So I see a concerto, Op.25 here: polish.musicsources.pl/pl/lokalizacje/galeria/rekopisy/6523-concertos/1 Unfortunately they only have the piano part, so I can't do much with it unless I find the orchestra parts somewhere. There is a concert piece for piano and orchestra that has full parts: polish.musicsources.pl/pl/lokalizacje/galeria/rekopisy/6543-konzerstuck/1 as well as another concert piece: polish.musicsources.pl/pl/lokalizacje/galeria/rekopisy/6541-konzerstuck/2 Though this one is also just the piano part. I could do the first of those two, but I'd need another source with full parts to do his concerto or the second concert piece. It's possible I'm missing something, as the site is of course in Polish, which I don't read, so I'm having to translate in the browser. If you know where I can find the full parts, let me know. I've got a few queued up to go before I start another new one, so no rush.

Fun to play as well. (Though that's the computer playing, not me. I'm good enough to impress non-musicians, but I don't think I'd put my own performance in these videos.)

Yeah, I found the sudden changes in volume to be rather surprising as well, but it's what the composer wrote. I've never seen another score with so many "fff"s and "ppp"s often in close proximity. It was even worse in my first rendition, before I chose the option to "Normalize Audio", which flattens out the really loud parts. On my first render they were so loud they were clipping on my headphones, causing a terrible staticky noise. (There might be a difference if listened to on a good speaker setup, but I've always used headphones.) One of many technical issues I ran into with this one. The tempo choices were one of the main reasons this took so long - I started it back in March. Obviously I've been working on many other pieces in the meantime but every time I looked back at this one I was just faced with a wall of indecision about how to interpret some part of it. I think I might've gone a bit fast on the opening section, but in a later section where the theme is reproduced in a different time signature (the end of section "E"), I feel like it'd drag if I slowed that whole section down to where I think the opening should be. Likewise, in the 3rd "movement", the main theme at "M" is repeated in another time signature at "R", in this case I took it slower to fit some of the ornaments in a more playable tempo, which were impossibly fast if played at the original "M" speed. Also I think there's some significance to the theme being written normally on 8th notes but in that section on quarter notes, so it's maybe justified? Hard to say.

Possibly? They are both Austrian, and Nicolay was born 14 years before Mozart, though it's possible they began composing around the same time since Mozart famously started very young. (Though Mozart's early concertos were not entirely his own - he merely orchestrated works by J.C. Bach and others. Still impressive for his age, of course.) However, Nicolay was living in Paris for much of his musical career. I'm not sure how well travelled his works were, since he's obviously much less well-known.

Thanks for listening. I still prefer his 4th, even if it was a lot more work to extract from the poor quality manuscript. (Maybe that's just my natural preference for the minor keys) It does make me curious about the 5th and 6th, which I only know about from their mention on his French Wikipedia page. I also looked at the first two, also good, but until I can find the orchestral parts somewhere you won't hear them here, unfortunately. IMSLP only has the keyboard parts.

Thanks for listening - this one was more effort than usual given the number of errors I had to correct. I almost get the impression that the person who originally typeset this piece was not an actual musician. I hope there's an original manuscript by the composer out there somewhere, but given the fact that it was composed in the middle of the French Revolution, I wouldn't be surprised if some things got lost in that time...

Thanks for listening. Next week is his 4th concerto, which I prefer to this one, but I've always preferred the minor keys. It needed a lot more work though, as the score has many errors I've had to correct.

Thanks for listening, more to come.

Well, I'm always open to suggestions for other composers to look at. I notice you're in Spain? That's a bit of a blind spot for me, I'm sure there's some good Spanish composers that aren't on my radar - most of the ones I know about are much more recent and generally not public domain. I seem to have done a lot of German ones, but that's just what's available to me, not a deliberate choice. (It does seem like the majority of classical music from this time period does come from there, but maybe that's just what's been preserved mostly.) I'm also looking for more sources for scores. IMSLP has been pretty good for that, but there's a lot of stuff they don't have. I know there are some libraries that lend out scores, but mostly only to orchestras, and anyhow I mostly stick with digital copies of the scores rather than paper manuscripts, so I can freely mark them up. Beyond that, just spreading the word helps. I'd like to get the attention of some orchestras if you happen to know any - the whole point of this channel is to inspire these lost works to be performed for real.

That would be because it is. See disclaimer in the description. The purpose of this channel is to create simulated performances of never-recorded works, in the hopes of maybe inspiring a real orchestra to perform and record them. Obviously a real performance would be far superior, but this is better than nothing at all.

Thanks for listening. It's too bad I can't seem to find his second concerto (nicknamed "Prairie"), beyond the solo reduction on IMSLP. I've played it myself (sans orchestra of course) - it's short, only one movement, but there's some good stuff in there.

@@Darrel_Hoffman Yes it's a pity that 'La Prairie' isn't available in any of the reliable world catalogues - Paris would be the obvious place to start, but it doesn't appear in the France Union Catalogue, so is perhaps either lost or in private ownership.

Thanks, more to come. Not from Nicolay - these two are the only concertos he wrote that I know of. But my next few releases are from around the same time period.

@@Darrel_Hoffman Thank you. I am going to be enjoying your next works with pleasure.

I do my note-entry in a program called Mozart, which I've found is the fastest and easiest for that of all the programs I've tried. I used to use Mozart exclusively, but (starting from the Kleeberg Concerto) I now export MIDI from that and import it into MuseScore, which gives much better sound quality. I do all the polish now in MuseScore (articulation, ornaments, dynamics), but Mozart is still way faster for the basic note-entry since it can be done entirely from the keyboard, while MuseScore (and most other programs I've seen) require constant switching between mouse and keyboard, or sometimes using both at once, which really slows you down. I know a lot of people use Sibelius, Encore, Finale, Dorico, and a few others, but those are all a bit expensive, while MuseScore is free. (Mozart isn't free either, but I've had it for years - granted I'm a few versions older than their current one.) To be slightly pedantic, the output from MuseScore is not technically MIDI but a newer format called SoundFonts. I think it's still MIDI under the hood, but with some enhancements. MIDI has been around a lot longer, but it has some major limitations - First, you're limited to 16 channels at a time, which these concertos definitely push against. You can share channels and play multiple notes at once, provided they're the same instrument, but if 2 instruments on the same channel need to play the same note but with different lengths, you just can't. This also applies to instruments which can be played in more than one way - e.g. pizzicato vs. arco on strings need to be separate instruments, so you either need to use more channels, or do lots of voice-changes every time it switches. Also it's not possible in MIDI to change the volume mid-note. Not a problem for the piano as real pianos can't do that either, but most of the other instruments can, so that's harder to deal with.

Pardon for my ignorance, what does fyrexianoff means?

oh nvm it's a youtube channel! i remember watching some piece uploaded by someone with that name lol

Yes, it's actually the 3rd-largest of my sources for piano concertos on TH-cam, after Remus Platen and Corentin Boissier's collection of channels. And unlike those two, they're mostly score videos as well. Fyrexianoff is the reason I was inspired to do scores instead of just audio-only.

Good to know there's an audience even for these older works. My main focus is on Romantic period concertos, but there's only so many of those that haven't been recorded, while there's lots of forgotten stuff from this time period. These are also generally a lot less work - except when I need to write cadenzas - I probably spent more time on the two cadenzas than I did on the whole concerto and I'm still not satisfied with them. Ah well. More are definitely coming, so thanks for listening.

Might as well provide a link: th-cam.com/video/yMC_l1mEii0/w-d-xo.html I took a look at his channel - he's mostly doing symphonies, while I'm focused on piano concertos, so there's not much overlap. Besides Zellner, he's done one movement of the Gyula Major concerto, which I'll admit sounds better than my rendition. He also did a work by Carl Joseph Brambach, whose concerto remains one of my favorite that I've transcribed, possibly due for a re-mastering since I've improved my sound quality since then by using MuseScore.

@@Darrel_Hoffman yep you guys make me both happy with different stuff. A few people also do solo piano works on MIDI but solo piano literature is immense (however studies are welcome especially because there's no imperative need of expression; well not completely true but .... Ok). MIDI doesn't work well for chamber music that could also be a great source of unheard masterworks. It doesn't work at all for vocal music unfortunately hence God knows how many great cantatas, oratorios, masses, motets, etc. we'll never enjoy. Sore for off topics.

I have the MuseScore files I created for this, and that can export to XML, but I've never done that before, so I'm not sure how the fidelity is. They are also optimized for audio over visual, so I did some things that are maybe not pretty in the interests of making it sound better. (e.g. spelling out ornaments explicitly rather than just using the symbols, doubling up on the string parts for a fuller sound, etc.) If you just want the sheet music, the original PDF's are free on IMSLP, which is where I found them. Link is in the description. There's one file for the piano (which was also used for the visuals in this video) and another for the orchestra parts.

Thanks, I wasn't sure if there was much of an audience for this sort of thing, given how relatively few people watched my other Baroque or early Classical pieces - It might be the Bach name that helped here - almost nobody's heard of Barbieri or Masek or Tapray, but Bach is a household name. Granted not many people know about THIS Bach, but the name could still be a draw. I might do more of these if people are interested, as there's a much larger pool of them to choose from. (The more recent stuff is far more likely to have existing recordings.) And they do tend to be a lot less work, as they're usually shorter and with fewer parts. I do prefer Romantic period stuff personally, but that well is running a bit dry, and they take a lot more time to do. I may space them out to give them the time they need and do these simpler ones in between.

@@Darrel_Hoffman thanks much 🙂