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Tired of the same old cello études? A little research unearthed a treasure trove
Each year, when January rolls around, my colleague Colleen McGary-Smith and I confer on our New Year's étude resolution-and agree on which advanced cello études to concentrate on that year. We have habitually chosen one of three: David Popper's High School of Cello Playing, the JeanLouis Duport études, or the Alwin Schroeder three-volume collection, of which we usually concentrate on the latter two volumes. As you may surmise, we have been doing this for a number of years. We each try to go through the designated études over the course of the year, preparing them well enough that we "wouldn't be embarrassed to play them for colleagues."
This January, Colleen admitted that she was bored of our usual choices, and we agreed that we might as well work on the Piatti Caprices if we supplemented them with something new (to us) and different. So, with that in mind, we decided to mine the collective "hive mind" on the Internet Cello Society's Facebook page, and within a few days, we had over 40 comments! And, besides all that wonderful input, we also started exploring on our own. The results are rich and varied, and most rewarding.
Essentially, the studies we have started to explore fall into three broad categories: older works that we may have forgotten by well-known composers, forgotten works by composers we perhaps didn't know, and newer works we hadn't heard about.
Older Works by Well-Known Composers
Alwin Schroeder, the German cellist who became principal of the Boston Symphony in 1891, collected études by a variety of composer-cellists for his 170 Foundation Studies for Violoncello. Divided into three progressive volumes, the Foundation Studies sample works by many significant 19th-century cellists, including...