Belle Au Bois Dormant (The Sleeping Beauty) Tchaikovsky-Pletnev And : Stravinsky's Petrouchka: a study of piano transcriptions comprising performances and analyses

As the costs for mounting opera, ballet and orchestral concerts rise and as their audiences dwindle, piano transcriptions of works orchestrated for such concerts can be a viable way of disseminating the music more widely than if the music was presented only in its original form. With this in mind, it can be argued that piano transcriptions of music originally written for instrumental ensemble is still a viable form of musical expression, because the piano is still the most widely used medium for the performance of art music in the Western world. Transcriptions of instrumental and vocal music expand the listening audience for a composer's music while they also increase the repertoire of music for the piano for both amateurs and professionals. As the orchestral score is quite well known, the differentiation created by Pletnev, and the quality of his work, can be immediately perceived by hearing the execution of his scores and being able to cross reference his reductions with the original score. Timing references for the piano score have been included to further facilitate this cross- referencing.