Having completed all the As in my stash of unread music (one volume, 5 pieces of Albeniz), it’s time to move on the the Bs. This will take me a while. I’ve already sight-read through or performed or taught a lot of Bach and all the Beethoven Sonatas; here’s what’s left in my stack of music to be sight-read:

• Bach – Well Tempered Clavier, Volume II; Miscellaneous Keyboard Works (Toccatas, Fugues and Other Pieces)
• Bartok – Allegro Barbaro, Three Rondos on Folk Tunes, Mikrokosmos Vol. 4
• Bortkewicz – A Musical Picture Book. Teaching repertoire, but I’m only familiar with one of the 12 pieces so I’ll read through them all.
• Brahms – bits and bobs of the Intermezzi, Fantasias, and other shorter piano works; Scherzo in E flat. These look daunting.
• Burgmuller – opus 100, 105 and 109. Again, teaching rep, but it will be good for me technically.
• Busoni – transcriptions of Bach – I’m thinking maybe not, as I don’t have a monstrously big hand. While I can reach a 9th fairly comfortably, you need almost 2 octaves for these!
• Buxtehude – took me awhile to figure out what this book was – the lettering is entirely in Russian and my knowledge of the Russian alphabet is pretty much non-existant. Buxtehude was an organ composer; I’m not sure why I have this – it must have been handed down to me. Probably won’t work well on the piano – I could use the pipe organ setting on the keyboard, so just stick it into my unused-these-days organ files.

And so begins my summer…

Related articles: Beethoven Sonatas; A Funny Thing Happened; Confronting Opus 22