Cécile Chaminade - Berceuse arabe,

The score to this is not yet on imslp, but here It is probably one of the last piano pieces she composed and it is different in many ways from what I know from her music. It is still salon, but it manages to incorporate arabian influences in a convincing way, I think. I like the fact that she was open to these influences, rather than writing 140 waltzes or so. The writing is gentle, dynamically we move around mp to mf, sometimes reducing to ppp even. It needs a lot of control to really play “mp ma sonore“ and not just play a forte. The right hand runs are a neat device; the interpretation needs some thinking, and I am certainly not an expert in arabian music. I think it doesn’t need too much rubato actually (less is more), but nevertheless the music feels like somebody is singing a chant, and that should reflect in the general phrasings too. It needs some freedom at some places to feel natural. The sound is vsl&