Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Recommendations for piano/orchestra "play-along" books?

I have a student who has expressed interest in playing a piece from this type of book for our Spring recital, and since I have never used them before, I am hoping some of you may have some recommendations. I am looking for books with piano solos that come with a CD that has orchestral accompaniment for each piece, so the student can perform along with the CD at the recital. This student is in the level 3 Alfred books, but I also have a level 4 student who is interested in doing this as well, so basically, early intermediate to intermediate books.

Would really appreciate any input here. Thanks!

Just a few that I can remember immediately:

*I think Faber's Piano Adventures course books have corresponding CD and MIDI accompaniments to go along with the pieces.

*Alfred's Premier piano course has accompaniment CDs, as well as do some of their adult courses.

I haven't used any of these but I could suppose that they're fairly well-done orchestrations, considering the publishers.

Those are probably good suggestions.

Real live duets are even better.

For intermediate students, I like the duets to the Clementi Sonatinas. They're by Henry Timm. I play the duet part on my clavinova with the 'strings' setting so it sounds a little like a piano concerto.

I have been using play along CD's a lot. The problem is finding good ones. Most of the time the tempos are too fast, or the chord changes to weird. I started creating my own pieces using apple loops. It does takes time to compose, score and record but it is a lot of fun. It is surprising what you can do with a fairly simple computer program.
My students look forward to playing along and it sure beats trying to persuade them to work with the metronome but is just as effective. I can send them a link and they download the tracks straight to their mp3 players. It was a big hit at the last recital.