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patH Offline OP
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Hello,

Decades ago, I made a recording of a piano piece from the radio. Unfortunately I did not record the name of the piece, or the composer.
Recently I thought that maybe it might be nice to try it out.

I played the piece to Shazam and SoundHound; but got no results.
I went to musipedia; but it needs Adobe Flash.

So I am now asking here. Does anybody know this piece?
Piano piece snippet, mp3

It seems to be a sort of rondo; I tried to enter the theme in MuseScore. The very simplified version looks like this.
PDF Score simplified

I am not sure if I got the measures right; it could be 6/8 instead of 3/4.
But I am pretty sure it's in F major.

Any help is welcome.


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Don't know, although it feels somewhat familiar.

My best/first guess on the composer is Arensky; I don't expect most people to know of him, and really I don't know much about him myself grin ....but that's my first-blush impression. So, I skimmed on youtube through some Arensky waltzes, since this is basically a waltz, but that didn't give me an answer.

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patH Offline OP
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Originally Posted by Mark_C
Don't know, although it feels somewhat familiar.

My best/first guess on the composer is Arensky; I don't expect most people to know of him, and really I don't know much about him myself grin ....but that's my first-blush impression. So, I skimmed on youtube through some Arensky waltzes, since this is basically a waltz, but that didn't give me an answer.

Thanks for the suggestion; but I looked into a few scores of Arensky; and I don't think it's from him. Arensky seems to be late romantic; early impressionist; the piece I'm looking for sounds a bit like from the time of Chopin; or mid-19th century.

I have now uploaded the ending of the piece. It's about 3 minutes long; and maybe someone will recognize it.
Piano piece, end (ca. 3 minutes)


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Really hope someone has a clue. I don't.
(And I don't feel too bad about it because nobody else does either.) ha

I looked around a little further, got nowhere.

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This piece is so familiar. One of my pianists played it in ballet class when I called for an exercise with a large movement ending in a fast foot movement. I'm trying hard to remember. Try this Arabesque by Claude Debussy. Of course my pianist wouldn't play the whole piece but the 2nd clip sounded so much like being back in the studio (I'm retired)..

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Good to have any further input, but one thing I think we can say pretty confidently, it ain't Debussy or anything close to Debussy. smile

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It sounds like ballet music, possibly a transcription of a ballet from an opera.


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Too bad!

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Originally Posted by Dreamingstill
This piece is so familiar. One of my pianists played it in ballet class when I called for an exercise with a large movement ending in a fast foot movement. I'm trying hard to remember. Try this Arabesque by Claude Debussy. Of course my pianist wouldn't play the whole piece but the 2nd clip sounded so much like being back in the studio (I'm retired)..


It definitely isn't Debussy.

I know a lot of Arensky and this isn't something I immediately recognize. It also feels like it's too old for Arensky. Instead, I'm getting kind of a "lesser-known Glinka waltz" vibe from it. Though I'm not convinced it's a waltz. Maybe it's a mazurka? Not sure. Though, the more I listen to the first part, the more it feels like it's 6/8.

It's got a salon-type ending that could be a whole host of forgotten composers.

Hmmm. Now I'm really curious to figure it out.


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patH Offline OP
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The riddle is solved!

I mailed to the radio station where I had recorded the piece, and got an answer about 12 hours later.
It is:

Gioachino Rossini
Valse anti-dansante
From "Pèchés de Vieillesse, vol.8 (Album du Château)"

The next challenge will be to find a score. IMSLP doesn't seem to carry it. But hopefully I can find it somewhere else.


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Great detective work!
It is available at sheet music plus.
Sheet music plus

You might be able to search for album de chateau From other sources

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Originally Posted by patH
The riddle is solved!

I mailed to the radio station where I had recorded the piece, and got an answer about 12 hours later.
It is:

Gioachino Rossini
Valse anti-dansante
From "Pèchés de Vieillesse, vol.8 (Album du Château)"

Wasn't Rossini's Sins of Old Age the source of another snippet of tune posted here about six years ago (which was also a competition with a prize for the winner), that got PW people scratching their respective heads (with or without hair) for a while before the answer was finally revealed? I remember that the tune resembled the opening of Saint-Saëns's Clarinet Sonata (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHt4PFKiQE0) and people were trying to make it 'fit'. grin

Which is to say that next time we hear a good tune which sounds vaguely 'familiar' and Romantic, think Rossini in his old age, churning out tunes while refining his recipe for Tournedos Rossini (and of course eating it........).


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Published in The Castle Album, Part II, by Masters Music Publications.


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Originally Posted by bennevis
Wasn't Rossini's Sins of Old Age the source of another snippet of tune posted here about six years ago (which was also a competition with a prize for the winner), that got PW people scratching their respective heads (with or without hair) for a while before the answer was finally revealed? I remember that the tune resembled the opening of Saint-Saëns's Clarinet Sonata (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHt4PFKiQE0) and people were trying to make it 'fit'. grin

Dunno if we're thinking of the same thing but there was a thing, just about that amount of time ago (I would have thought a little longer ago but basically that), about a contest on the radio, where FOUR NOTES of a piano piece were given, and you had to guess the composer and the piece, and it was indeed Rossini. I don't rememember what piece, but I do remember the notes, sort of.

I don't think any of us had ever heard of the piece, and not many of us even knew that Rossini wrote solo piano music.


Holy crapolo -- I found that thread! (And it is the one you were talking about. I see on there that you mention the Saint-Saens.)
All it took was doing a search on this site for the word Rossini in posts of mine during that period of time.
Unfortunately the link to the radio site doesn't have that fragment any more, but the thread has a link to the piece, and info about where the fragment occurs.

old discussion about Rossini piano piece

edit #2: At that time we didn't find the piece on youtube but now there are a few recordings.
Here's one. The 'fragment' is in the section beginning at 2:26, maybe right at 2:41.
BTW, in the thread I noted that the radio-quiz fragment was played as though the rhythm were triplets, rather than dotted. I wondered if maybe it was thought that Rossini meant triplets but wrote it dotted for convenience; such things are (arguably) sometimes done.
In this recording, it's played exactly like it looks on the page: pure dotted.


Last edited by Mark_C; 02/15/18 02:20 PM.
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Originally Posted by Mark_C

Holy crapolo -- I found that thread! (And it is the one you were talking about. I see on there that you mention the Saint-Saens.)
All it took was doing a search on this site for the word Rossini in posts of mine during that period of time.
Unfortunately the link to the radio site doesn't have that fragment any more, but the thread has a link to the piece, and info about where the fragment occurs.

old discussion about Rossini piano piece

edit #2: At that time we didn't find the piece on youtube but now there are a few recordings.
Here's one. The 'fragment' is in the section beginning at 2:26, maybe right at 2:41.
BTW, in the thread I noted that the radio-quiz fragment was played as though the rhythm were triplets, rather than dotted. I wondered if maybe it was thought that Rossini meant triplets but wrote it dotted for convenience; such things are (arguably) sometimes done.
In this recording, it's played exactly like it looks on the page: pure dotted.


Thanks for finding that thread and the music! thumb

I never thought I'd find that piece again......


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Whoa. Definitely did not think of Rossini, and yet maybe I should have.

We just staged a whole production a few years ago of the ballet "La Boutique Fantasque," which had some really interesting musical themes in it. Curious about them, I learned the composer, Respighi, constructed the ballet out of orchestral arrangements of Rossini's piano music. And I said to myself, "Rossini? How often do people have occasion to think about Rossini's piano music?"

Well, I guess the answer is: more than one might think.

Anyway, plenty of the selections pull from Sins of Old Age, and one of them even comes from the Album de Chateau.

At the time I tried to download the whole collection of Sins of Old Age rather than reverse engineer the Respighi-arranged pieces back to piano, and ran into the same problem....not all of them were on imslp or my other go-to sites for finding public-domain music.

Gioachino Rossini: the reigning king of "wait, where have I heard that?" piano music.

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Originally Posted by TwoSnowflakes
At the time I tried to download the whole collection of Sins of Old Age rather than reverse engineer the Respighi-arranged pieces back to piano, and ran into the same problem....not all of them were on imslp or my other go-to sites for finding public-domain music.
Indeed.

Sheetmusicplus mentions that it takes 2-3 weeks for the score to leave the warehouse, and 3-6 more weeks of delivery.
I asked a local music store if they could order it faster. Answer: They can't order it at all.
I downloaded AudioScore (demo version) and played the excerpt to it; the result was musical gibberish. No point in paying money for it.

This year would be a good year to publish plenty of Rossini music. 150 years is a round number.
Bärenreiter mentions that they have Rossini's Late Piano Music "in preparation" (BA 10505-01). Sadly they don't mention a publication date. Anything before November 13th would be ok. But that would still mean waiting.
Guess I won't be playing this waltz at the European Piano Party 2018 after all...


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Maybe this will work for you (sorry it is such a large file) -

https://app.box.com/s/cljo3ufskg5kj7vmfoxyxrruxw8saxnd


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