Busoni plays Liszt: Concert Etude No. 2 (Gnomenreigen)

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Gnomenreigen (Dance of the Gnomes) in F-sharp minor it is known for its technical difficulty in its fast and soft passages, where the pianist imitates the sound of gnomes. It first has a theme in F-sharp minor consisting of grace notes followed by eights. Then it goes to a fast, playful theme in A major. It repeats themes, and also has a theme with repeating bass notes, such as the sixty consecutive low Ds. Finally, the A major theme is repeated for a climactic part of the étude, this time in F-sharp major.

The piece was heard in an orchestral arrangement as part of the Little Mermaid Ballet in the 1952 Danny Kaye film, Hans Christian Andersen.

Scanned 1910 Ampico Piano roll n. 51364, digitally restored by me with midi software and modern piano samples!

The Youtube piano rolls project
When i discovered that old piano rolls could be easily scanned with modern hardwares and then converted into an exact MIDI copy of the roll, i was pretty surprised that nobody has really taken the "duty" to upload, on a stable and frequented site like Youtube, all the material available on the internet. So today im planning to upload all the 1k files i have my hands on, trying to always respect the copyrights and trying when possible to search and synchronize the music sheets with the audio which is sampled from MIDI using some free software around online! What I've unexpectedly found is an almost infinite list of GREAT pieces, totally and inexplicably forgotten! Some of the pieces are completely never uploaded on any source on the net and some others are very rare to find; togheter whit these rare pearls we have also a lot of fantastic and very interesting performances of great and better known classical pieces recorded more or less one hundred years ago, where I've found that interpreting a piece was significantly different, hear to believe! This entire project is of course taking a lot of my free time (time to select, to fix with midi editor, to find the best sound with samplers and options, to look up the sheets and syncro etc) but that's still a thing I really wanna do, for pleasure, curiosity ,culture and for the others! So if you wanna help a little i may only ask to like, share and subscribe:) nothing more! Thanks if you read up here and have a good time! Bruno

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