Piano Solos
George Winston
2007 / Hal Leonard
104 pages / 20 songs
Review by Kathy Parsons
For years, piano icon George Winston refused to allow his music to appear in sheet music form, claiming that the music was too personal, so I was surprised when this collection of Winston’s music was made available. Apparently, Tom Bockhold did the transcriptions, and then Winston went through them with the recordings, fine-tuning them to his exacting standards. The transcriptions are clean and spacious, and include the chord charts. Most of the twenty pieces are quite easy to play, although some contain stretches of a tenth. My disappointment with the book is in the selection of songs. With all of the albums of primarily original music that Winston has released over the years, eleven of the twenty selections are his arrangements of other composers’ music rather than his own compositions. I was happy, however, that Winston included his arrangement of “Walking In the Air” from The Snowman. “Thanksgiving” has always been a favorite, and it’s interesting to see Winston’s versions of “Carol of the Bells” and “Variations On the Kanon By Pachelbel” in print even if I was dumbfounded that he put the Kanon into the key of C! George Winston’s many piano-playing fans will more than likely thoroughly enjoy this collection as long as they aren’t expecting the entire book to be Winston’s original compositions. This book is widely available wherever sheet music collections are sold.
August 7, 2009