Strauss: Waltzes, Volume II

These waltzes bring authentic Romantic-era salon music into the studio without sacrificing musical integrity. The Kalmus Edition preserves the character of the original orchestrations while making them pianistically idiomatic, giving intermediate-advanced players access to repertoire that sounds impressive and feels genuinely musical to perform.

Elegant, buoyant, and architecturally assured. These waltzes capture the sophisticated grace of Vienna's musical culture, with lilting melodies that seem to float above rich harmonic underpinnings and the unmistakable three-beat pulse that invites motion without demanding haste.

Pianists working at the intermediate-advanced level who are ready to explore Romantic-era concert repertoire beyond the standard solo canon. These pieces suit both recital programming and students developing facility with nineteenth-century performance practice and orchestral textures at the keyboard.

• Shape each eight-bar phrase with a gentle swell rather than mechanical phrasing; Strauss waltzes breathe like dance music even when played as concert pieces.
• Maintain rhythmic flexibility in the accompaniment without losing the waltz pulse; the right hand melody often calls for slight rubato that the left hand should support rather than constrain.
• Balance the melodic line against inner voices and countermelodies that often appear in the middle register; this is orchestral writing translated to the keyboard, not purely treble-dominated texture.
• Practice the hand independence required for the characteristic Viennese waltz rhythm, paying particular attention to how broken chord figures in the left hand support harmonic movement.

Include one or two waltzes on a recital featuring Romantic-era keyboard music, or program them alongside Schubert and Chopin to show how different composers engaged with dance forms. They also work well as encores, offering audiences the immediate pleasure of recognizable, beautifully crafted melodies.

• Pedal control and resonance in Romantic-era harmonic contexts
• Independence between right-hand melody and left-hand waltz accompaniment figures
• Phrasing and rubato within a metric framework
• Reading and executing orchestrally-conceived textures at the keyboard
• Articulation and voicing of inner melodic lines in multi-voice textures