Tchaikovsky duet on marimba and oboe

During the summer months Faith Lutheran Church reduces from three Sunday morning services down to two. Also, because the Spirit of Faith choir takes a break during this time, there are many opportunities for instrumentalists and vocalists to lend their talents to the worship service. I decided last month to fill one of the slots with my friend Andy and play some marimba+english horn and marimba+oboe duets.

Many marimbists are probably familiar with Leigh Howard Stevens‘ transcriptions of Tchaikovsky‘s “Album for the Young” for solo marimba. Instead of playing this as a marimba solo, we divided the part and made a duet. You can listen to the “Waltz” here.

For the marimba+english horn part, we decided to try one of the Bach two part inventions. Our intentions were good, but we will wait until round two before posting that duet. 🙂

My friend Andy’s blog post has more on the event if you are interested.

2 thoughts on “Tchaikovsky duet on marimba and oboe

  1. Hello Jeff!

    I was impressed by your waltz for oboe and marimba. I play the oboe myself and my twin sister plays the marimba. We are looking for some music to play together. We’re going to china with our orchestra and we’re holding a free podium evening with the conservatory orchestra of Wuhan, and we really would like tot play something together there. Is it maybe possible for us that we can play your arrangement (both Tchaikovsky and Bach, so we can see what fits us best)? It would be very nice to let me know what the possibilities are!
    Thank you!

  2. Hi there,
    Great to meet you. You can buy the sheet music for the arrangement we used of “Album for the Young” at http://www.steveweissmusic.com/product/23071/marimba-solo#full-description. You can also get it at Lone Star Percussion at this address: http://www.lonestarpercussion.com/Sheet-Music-Books/Marimba-Solo-Collections/Album-for-the-Young-Tchaikovsky.html where there is also a video of a marimba soloist playing a couple more of the pieces. What we did for arranging it for marimba and oboe was just for the marimba player to play the bass notes and the oboe to play the top melody line. Some of the pieces work better for this than others. As for the Bach, we just took the music from the IMSLP.org website. Some of them need to be transposed to fit the english horn.

    Thanks for stopping by!
    -Jeff Sass

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