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Brian Slawson captures the spirit of the third movement of Beethoven’s famous piano sonata (dubbed The Tempest) expertly with this rendition for vibraphone and two marimbas. The arrangement is rife with healthy musical challenges for keyboard trio: A relentless pulse that drives throughout the entire four minutes, extreme dynamics (mostly on the softer side), and the necessity of great communication between all players. If you need a little Beethoven mixed into your next percussion concert (and really, who doesn’t?), this is a great choice!
This piece comes as a professionally printed and bound score and includes individual parts in PDF format for printing or for tablet viewing.
As a reviewer, it is always a pleasure to receive a piece for which there is an immediate and obvious opportunity for performance or programming. I can confidently state that Brian Slawson’s arrangement of Beethoven’s “The Storm” will be part of a future semester’s concert by my college ensemble and might also make its way into other chamber percussion ensembles in which I play. The source piece, of course, is an excellent one, but Slawson’s ability to find works that translate particularly well to percussion, and his scoring and understanding of the percussion keyboard voices, enhance what was already a work by a master composer.
Scored in both 6/8 and 3/4 time signatures, Beethoven’s composition seamlessly dances between the duple and triple feels of these two meters, occasionally blurring the primary pulse, while other times projecting it with clear emphasis. “The Storm” is not absent of a melody, but the overarching harmonic movement scored in undulating arpeggios and the metric shifts contribute equally to the effectiveness of the composition and are highlighted in the scoring of this arrangement. The marimba voices are expected to be almost perfectly inter-woven, with the vibraphone providing a complementary textural role, emphasizing certain notes and sustaining over the virtually continuous marimba eighth notes. All three parts are playable with two mallets throughout, extremely accessible rhythmically, and only pose a performance challenge in terms of tempo, pitch accuracy (the piece is extremely tonal such that a missed note would be immediately obvious), and realizing the indicated articulations and dynamics to appropriately bring to the forefront the work’s primary lines and figures.
–Josh Gottry
Percussive Notes
Vol. 54, No. 2, May 2016
Brian Slawson captures the spirit of the third movement of Beethoven’s famous piano sonata (dubbed The Tempest) expertly with this rendition for vibraphone and two marimbas. The arrangement is rife with healthy musical challenges for keyboard trio: A relentless pulse that drives throughout the entire four minutes, extreme dynamics (mostly on the softer side), and the necessity of great communication between all players. If you need a little Beethoven mixed into your next percussion concert (and really, who doesn’t?), this is a great choice!
This piece comes as a professionally printed and bound score and includes individual parts in PDF format for printing or for tablet viewing.
As a reviewer, it is always a pleasure to receive a piece for which there is an immediate and obvious opportunity for performance or programming. I can confidently state that Brian Slawson’s arrangement of Beethoven’s “The Storm” will be part of a future semester’s concert by my college ensemble and might also make its way into other chamber percussion ensembles in which I play. The source piece, of course, is an excellent one, but Slawson’s ability to find works that translate particularly well to percussion, and his scoring and understanding of the percussion keyboard voices, enhance what was already a work by a master composer.
Scored in both 6/8 and 3/4 time signatures, Beethoven’s composition seamlessly dances between the duple and triple feels of these two meters, occasionally blurring the primary pulse, while other times projecting it with clear emphasis. “The Storm” is not absent of a melody, but the overarching harmonic movement scored in undulating arpeggios and the metric shifts contribute equally to the effectiveness of the composition and are highlighted in the scoring of this arrangement. The marimba voices are expected to be almost perfectly inter-woven, with the vibraphone providing a complementary textural role, emphasizing certain notes and sustaining over the virtually continuous marimba eighth notes. All three parts are playable with two mallets throughout, extremely accessible rhythmically, and only pose a performance challenge in terms of tempo, pitch accuracy (the piece is extremely tonal such that a missed note would be immediately obvious), and realizing the indicated articulations and dynamics to appropriately bring to the forefront the work’s primary lines and figures.
–Josh Gottry
Percussive Notes
Vol. 54, No. 2, May 2016
