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Folks,

A couple of day ago, I picked up the "Flight of the Bumble Bee" and have spent several hours working on it. A couple of questions have popped up and I was hoping your expertise might help:

I've got the music-scores.com version. This seems slightly different in several places to the 3 MP3 versions I have from browsing. Are there several versions of the same piece? Specifically, bars 51 through 58 and 95 through 98 are clearly different, they may be other parts as well. In 51 through 58, I have octaves in the right hand whereas the versions I've heard have 6th's (I think).

Finally, there are many 10th's (left hand) in the last couple of pages. I cannot stretch a 10th with my left hand so would have to "roll". I've tried rolling but even at speed, it sounds awful (as well as obvious) and all of the crispness of the piece is lost. Has anyone ever written an alternative or should I just "guess" (or maybe persevere with the 10th's for the sake of originality)?

Thanks for any comments

Regards,

Gary (who's jealous of anyone that can comfortably stretch a 10th!)

The recordings might have been of the Rachmaninoff arrangement, wheras the music-scores.com version could have been arranged by someone else. Just a guss.

If you find the 10ths too hard, you could substitute it with a 2nd position chord (if the 10th was C&E then G-C-E, especially if its not the Rach arrangement)

I'm not familiar with this piece, but I've
found that if rolling a big chord you can't
stretch doesn't sound good, then "gracing"
it often sounds much better and crisper,
that is, playing the bottom note like a
grace note, with the 5th finger, and then
hitting the rest of the notes in the chord
with fingers 4 to 1.

Thanks Gyro, the piece is fairly rapid with no pedal throughout and the left hand punch through with staccato chords (sparse) to carry the melody through the busy and chromatic right hand. I'll give the "grace" effect a try and see what it sounds like

FWIW, I'm sure you will have heard this very famous piece by Rimsky-Korsakov

Thanks,

Gary.

Max,

I think you're correct - on one of the MP3's, Rach was mentioned so this must be it. I'll have to try to locate the sheet music of this particular arrangement - it's not vastly different from the one I'm playing but I would like to play the one that everyone knows best.

Once I'd read your comment, I went back and substituted the 10th's on the 3rd page for the chords on the 1st page of the music and it worked fine. Basically what the arranger had done is to open up the chords in the front section to make a difference later (the latter section is played an octave higher).

I can get the piece sorted like this but will also work to see if I can't make the 10th's work as well (I'm a little impatient unfortunately to take the time to really work on it :rolleyes: ).

Regards,

Gary.

Email me (valarking@gmail.com) if you want a pdf of the Rachmaninoff or (god forbid!) the Cziffra one.