Mahler. Adagietto from Symphony no 5

This arrangement was intended to be an encore for one of my performances with a symphony orchestra. I just learned the Left-Hand Piano concerto by Maurice Ravel - one of my favorites - and to create a left-hand arrangement seemed to be logical. Ravel’s concerto is very compact, so I decided to approach some major work for the transcription. While listening to a lot of Mahler at that time, the Adagietto from Symphony No 5 became an easy and natural choice for me. It fit perfectly into my concept of a left-hand-only piece, since it is written only for strings and harp. Its limitation in the original orchestration gave me the ability to justify the idea of “limiting” a pianist also, and to create additional challenges to the arrangement. I did not perform it that time, though. And I did not actually perform it for many, many years after its creation. Something stopped me even beginning. Only recently, thinking about the program for this very album, I finally dove into it properly, and the arrangement started to play an important role in my repertoire.