"A Leaf" Beatles Piano Transcriptions

This CD contains four arrangements from Aki Takahashi's Hyper Beatles project, which commissioned 47 composers from around the world to arrange their favorite Beatles songs: Toru Takemitsu (who also uniquely embarked on a Beatles transcription project for solo guitar), Frederic Rzewski, Barbara Monk-Feldman and Ryuichi Sakamoto...a tremendous range in approaches. Sakamoto's Aki2.2, on the one hand, allows the performer to play according to her own inner musical instincts, based on basic impulses provided in the score - a technique that follows the example of John Cage and certain other modern composers. PUnlike the Beatles transcriptions by these modern classical composers, A Leaf is a classically-styled piano solo piece, written by the pop star Paul McCartney as a serious composition. It is his second work in the classical idiom after his first Liverpool Oratorio. A Leaf, in its orchestral version can be heard on the album, 'Working Classical,' though it was originally conceived as solo piano piece.