Backdated, archival post
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This morning I listened to some excerpts of Grieg's lyric pieces for piano. I'm most familiar with the first piece of the first book (Op. 12: I. Arietta) via Rod Argent's recording on Classically Speaking. Although this was an album entirely of Grieg pieces, after the Arietta, I expected to hear Chopin's Etude in C minor, Op. 25, No. 12 because that's the second track on Argent's Classically Speaking. I started wondering about the transition between the two pieces and thought there was something more to the relationship between them than just my familiarity with that particular sequencing.
I lookt up the notation for Grieg's Arietta and discovered that it's in Eb major. As the title of the Chopin piece would suggest, it's in C minor. C minor and Eb major are relative keys. Their scales contain all the same notes; they just start in different places. My expecting the Chopin piece after the Grieg piece revealed a clever bit of sequencing on Argent's part. There's a relatively smooth transition between the two pieces because they have similar tonalities.I noticed something about the sequencing of Classically Speaking yester-day.
