The New Violin Pieces Options

[fiddlingfee]

What do teachers think of the new pieces? I've only seen the new Gr2 violin pieces and on first glance they seem a bit hard especially List B with 2 pieces with 2 flats. It is a huge jump from Gr1 especially for younger kids or slower kids. I have been working on a few pieces from Gr4 (but not from the actual book yet) and they seem easier than last year. What have others found???

[fiddlingfee]

I have since seen more of the new violin pieces and I do not like them at all. The other violin teachers in my school are very disappointed with them too. I heard from another teacher that the AB don't neccessarily chose the best choices of pieces in the book but the most profitable ie. a 2 page piece instead of a 1 page piece. With the choice of pirces for the next 3 years I'll be talking a lot of my students out of doing an exam as I couldn't stand to work on them. :angry:

[SuzyMac]

Is it the same for violin as piano? I'm doing grade 8, and I'm not learning any of the pieces in the book, instead I've had to go out and buy 3 further books to find pieces I enjoy playing and can manage! What are the alternatives like?

[violin-ann]

Are you kidding fiddlingfee? I'm working on the Grade 4 violin pieces and I find that if I practice I shouldn't have trouble passing the old pieces as compared to the new ones! They are all so fast and tricky in terms of either ornaments, slurs, accidentals, or crossing of strings. I have been practicing just the first piece (vivace) for a month now, and it's still not quite exam standard yet. Even worse where speed is concerned.

The piano pieces are a lot tougher too with the same tricky bits as mentioned above for violin, except that -it's crossing up and down on the keyboard or tricky part-playing. :(

[fiddlingfee]

Violin-Ann the Gr4 pieces I was talking about are the Nocturne by Michael Rose and the Rondeau by Purcell. I started those pieces with students as we hadn't got the AB book yet. I was really looking for other teachers opinions on the pieces but as a student what do you think of them? Are they pieces you enjoy spending time on? Already a student of mine has asked never to play the C3 Gr2 piece ever again. It's just not a nice piece to play!

[chateauferret]

I'm not a teacher but an adult violin student who's been studying the old grade 4 pieces, the new grade 5 ones now, and I've also studied the second movement of Handel's third sonata which was set in the old grade 5 syllabus.

Certainly the new syllabus doesn't attract me as much as the old - the old had some recognisable things in it, tuneful stuff which we would know and recognise like the Salut d'Amour (in a different key, I seem to recall) and the Hary Janos thing, and the Czibulka looked like an attractive piece. The new C list is full of bizarre things: a two movement item where one of the movements is all pizzicato; a very modernesque Huws Jones item.

One of these days it looks as if I shall want to sit this exam, and would probably offer the degli Antoni, the Grieg or the Kreisler (at least there's still a Kreisler), and the Shostakovitch, which is actually not bad. Maybe the Schubert in list A. Well, maybe the choice isn't too bad. The Handel in the old list I much prefer to anything in the new.