Beginning Piano Solos: 132 Original Masterpieces (All Time Favotites 101)

I'm a career piano teacher with a doctorate in music, and I adore this book. It has such a perfect combination of pieces that it's worth as many as five or six books all by itself. It has Bach Minuets, Mozart Minuets, Beethoven and Haydn German Dances, selections from Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Bartok, Kabalevsky....it's a wonderful cross section of the best literature. If your student has finished with the pedagogical "starter" repertoire and is ready for his/her first real classical pieces from the canon of repertoire, this is the book for that stage of development. Many books try to accomplish this task but end up being dreary with boring selections. All the selections in this one are beautiful and enjoyable.

Exactly as described. Super fast shipping.

great book

There are LOTS of songs in this book - and many of the well-known classics.They are all original compositions, but they are not graded, nor in the book in order of difficulty, so you have to look and play through to see what will work for your student. This seems like a great book for introducing a student to the classics, or for sight reading practice for more accomplished student.

Perfect condition. I was replacing this book for my daughter as hers got torn in half. This was so inexpensive and looks like new. Received it quickly.

Teacher recommended.....This book is an excellent source for the student that has finished method books and for intermediate to sight-reading material. I like the way it is organized by composer. The binding could be better.

This is a pretty standard intermediate-level anthology of piano solos. The pieces appear in (roughly) chronological order, starting with Lully and Purcell and ending with Kabalevsky. The pieces do not get progressively harder towards the end of the book.It's certainly decent, but I would steer you instead to this one: Easy Piano Classics (Bastien Older Beginner Piano Library), which I think is much better done. Here's why:1. At least in a good sheet music store, you can get the Bastien already spiral bound, whereas this is not an option for the Sheftel.2. Sheftel has been very sparing in his editing -- too sparing. Unlike most other editors, for example, he doesn't mark any staccatos on Bach's minuets, to give just one example. He's a big Ur-text guy, so his approach is extremely laissez-faire. The problem is that nearly all of the pieces he anthologizes sound tons better with a bit of modern editing: dynamics, tempo, etc.3. Sheftel is frustratingly stingy with fingering notations, so be prepared to play with a pencil in one hand. His philosophy is that "passages which recur are not fingered, thus obliging the student to recognize the return of a previously given passage, and to finger it accordingly." This didn't help me a bit.Anyhow, although I prefer the Bastien I linked to, I keep this around and play from it every so often. This is because while the books are similar, they don't cover EXACTLY the same ground. In particular, Sheftel can boast that the pieces he's included are there in their original, unsimplified forms. In the Bastien, this is only occasionally true.However, if this is the kind of thing you're after, I think this book has been completely outdone by the later Essential Keyboard Repertoire: 100 Early Intermediate Selections in Their Original Form Baroque to Modern: 1. That book is very similar: similar editing philosophy, similar selections even. But unlike this one, it comes in a plastic comb binding that opens flat and, more importantly, is still in print. Even better, it's just the first book of a five-book series, so that further achievements await when you finish the first volume. In other words, get that one.

need to update the binding on this . should be paper back and not in Electronics. Thank you