El Perdón de Ploërmel

Description

A solo piano arrangement of music from Meyerbeer's opera Dinorah, or The Pilgrimage to Ploërmel, first staged in 1859. In the nineteenth century, arrangements like this were how a fashionable opera was known at home: with no recordings and no broadcasts, it was the piano that carried the music of the stage to people who could not get to the theatre.

The arrangement runs beyond sixteen minutes, following the opera's succession of scenes as it goes. Vocal melody, choral weight, orchestral interlude — contrasting music follows without a break, so this is less one piece than a miniature of an evening in the theatre. It contains over 3,300 notes.

Its intermediate rating reflects writing that is not especially complex scene by scene. The difficulty is the length: without changing colour and volume at every scene, sixteen minutes sound uniform. Imagine a singer's breathing in the vocal passages, weight in the choral ones, motion in the interludes. There is no need to play it whole — taking a favourite scene on its own is a natural way to approach it.

Orchestral and operatic melodies arranged for solo piano, letting listeners enjoy the charm of the original works on a single instrument.