I have been having a hard time finding a piano duet that I like for the May recital. My mom sent me a Shirmer Edition arrangement of Beethoven's Fifht Symphony. It's a hoot. The problem is, its too long. I am wondering if there is anyway to cut and paste and only play parts of it. My favorite movements are the first and second, and I have found a good place to end the first - and use it as a sort of introduction, but I am having trouble doing that with the second. Have any of you ever done this? Jodi

Leaving out the 3rd movt? I think that would be a fun-time duet. Try it again....

We can't possible do them all, so I was just trying to pick parts of one (or two) of the movements. The individual movements are a tad too long (its a mostly kids recital, and each kid plays two VERY SHORT pieces, and we don't want to bore anybody) Not sure that we will try to perform it, but its a lot of fun to practice. I still haven't gotten Ravel's Mother Goose Suite (its back ordered) so maybe there will be something in there that I like. The problem with a lot of the duets that I have come across is that only one of the parts is ever interesting. Either the bass (Bottom? Left Person?) is good and the treble (Top? Right Person?) has the melody in octaves, or the top is interesting and the bottom is nothing but Ooom-Pah-Pahs. Thats why I liked most of the two piano duos - you get to take turns doing the fun parts. Jodi

For the first movement you could just play the exposition and possibly tag on the coda to make the movement end in C-minor. It could leave the audience hanging if you end right before the development in the dominant key. You could try something similar in the 2nd movement by only playing the A section and skipping the middle sections. Sometimes you can more or less smoothly tag on part of the ending into the first of the movement. The audience is not likely to know that you've cut it short anyways.

Good luck!

Only slightly off the topic, a man named
Donald Beaty who teaches piano at Carbondale Illinois and is a big Beethoven fan organized a 7 or 9 piano rendition of the 5th Symphony and Egmont Overture which I was privileged enough to see about 8 years ago. Faculty players from about 5 states cooperated to give a unique performance that raised some goose flesh.