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Pianodao is the piano music, education, and wellbeing site of teacher, consultant, published author and composer Andrew Eales.

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The Christmas Shortlist 2026

Celebrate Christmas with Pianodao’s top piano sheet music picks for every skill level, ensuring joy and creativity this festive season!

Too few are able to simply sit down at any piano and play music they love, sharing it with others confidently. And during the Christmas and Winter season, this shortcoming can often be more obvious than ever…

A Contemporary Piano Collection

‘A Contemporary Piano Collection’, published by Kevin Mayhew, features 24 vibrant pieces written by five contrasting composers for intermediate to advanced pianists.

Essential Piano Education Resources 2026-7

Discover the best new releases and classic piano education resources to support your teaching studio in 2026. Here’s the annual round up…

ADHD • Insights for Pianists

This page is the gateway to Pianodao’s acclaimed ADHD series of articles, which bring together expert clinical insight and piano education advice to support learners, performers, and teachers.

Pianodao offers over 700 articles and reviews, all FREE to access.
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Winter Repertoire Project

Active Repertoire Project
Written by Andrew Eales

As winter sets in, enveloping everything in its frosty embrace, we can find it challenging to stay motivated and inspired. The shorter days, longer nights, and biting cold can make it tempting to hibernate until spring.

The human response, across cultures and continents, has long been to make space and create opportunities for communities to come together: shared festivals, celebrations and feast days that brighten our darkest months.

Musicians have always had a significant part to play in vibrant community life, and hopefully always will. For piano players this is a time of the year in which our Active Repertoire can feature prominently in our music-making and sharing with others.

The Christmas Shortlist 2026

Pianodao Music Library
Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales

There are many reasons why I love Christmas, but without doubt, among the best is the rich and varied tapestry of music we play purely for our enjoyment, and share with others for theirs. Music can and should always bring people together, and at this time of year it perhaps does so more than at any other.

Supporting players, teachers and learners everywhere, the Pianodao Music Library offers in depth reviews of a wide range of seasonally-themed piano publications to suit all tastes and levels of playing.

Each year, my Christmas Shortlist is here to help guide you through this treasure-trove, opening a door to this wealth of wonderful music, guided by level.

Best of all, the list automatically updates whenever titles are added, updated, or replace, so that you can come back throughout the season for the latest and best recommendations. Enjoy the festive season…

The Christmas Piano Book

The Christmas Shortlist
Selected and reviewed by Andrew Eales

Since Faber Music took charge of the esteemed Edition Peters publishing house, I’ve been interested to see how these two very different entities would complement each other. The new Christmas collection Das Klavierbuch zur Weihnacht provides compelling evidence that theirs is a partnership made in heaven.

To use the English translation (the book includes both German and English throughout), The Christmas Piano Book brilliantly combines Faber’s penchant for bumper anthologies that mix established classics with fresh arrangements and offer superb value, with Edition Peters’ more serious aesthetic and reputation for superb classical music editing.

According to the publishers,

The Christmas Piano Book brings together pianistic arrangements of the most popular carols from Germany and beyond, alongside a selection of festive piano pieces by renowned composers. Ideal for intermediate to advanced-level pianists, the collection features newly created arrangements of favourites such as Silent Night, O Tannenbaum and Joy to the World, alongside works ranging from Bach’s Sinfonia from the Christmas Oratorio and Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, to atmospheric pieces including Elfrida Andrée’s Julstämning and the title theme from Three Wishes for Cinderella. This beautifully presented volume is the ultimate companion for the festive season and an ideal Christmas gift.

This is indeed a beautiful publication, as well as a keenly priced one. The Christmas Piano Book is an easy recommendation, and here’s why I love it…

A Nostalgic Christmas

The Christmas Shortlist
Selected and reviewed by Andrew Eales

Each year, pianists seem to be inundated with another batch of Christmas piano publications, and I strive to recommend the best and most interesting on my annual Christmas Shortlist.

Among the highlights this year, A Nostalgic Christmas is a new publication from Hal Leonard which neatly fits the bill, and is (in my view) best suited to early advanced pianists. It offers:

“17 piano solo arrangements of Christmas favourites especially written to warm the hearts of the Grinches amongst us. All can be multipurpose and adapted for leisure or study, solitary or recital performances.”

For British tastes, the cover artwork may seem a little saccharine, but don’t be put off: these are interesting arrangements from some of the finest, including Phillip Keveren, Glenda Austin, Mona Rejino, Kevin Olson, and our own Nikki Iles (whose own Jazz on a Winter’s Night is an all-time favourite!).

Lost in translation

The Pianodao Guest Book
Interviews • Opinions • Guest Posts

In this passionate and thoughtful article, renowned piano pedagogue and best-selling author KAREN MARSHALL argues that exam feedback can combine rigorous standardised assessment with empathetic, accessible child-friendly language.

Please note: this article expresses the author’s own professional views and does not necessarily represent those of any organisation she has worked with.

Can exam feedback be both rigorous and child-friendly?

When a nine-year-old child opens their music exam report, what do we hope happens next? Ideally, they read a few lines of warm, constructive feedback, feel a surge of pride in their hard work, and head back to the piano with a genuine spark of curiosity about what to explore next.

From my experience, exam boards genuinely want to encourage students. Having authored and advised on pedagogy resources for awarding bodies like ABRSM and LCM Examinations, I know firsthand that their core mission is to foster a lifelong love of music.

Yet, as teachers, how often do we sit with parents who are utterly baffled by the words on the mark sheet?

We’ve got a problem with music theory

The Pianodao Guest Book
Interviews • Opinions • Guest Posts

Pianist, composer, and educator GARRETH BROOKE contributes this thoughtful, insightful, and provocative guest post, in which he challenges us to reconsider how we teach and learn music theory as pianists…

We’ve got a problem with music theory.

Actually, we’ve got many problems with music theory.

We are intimidated by it
We find it boring
We were taught it poorly
There are too few good resources out there
Our exam boards have warped our understanding of what it is
We often teach it merely so our students can progress to the next piano exam.

Thankfully it is not all bad news. There are good music theory teachers out there, just as there are musicians who have a profound understanding of theory, and there are increasing numbers of good teaching resources available. Sadly, though, they still represent a sizeable minority rather than what they should be: the overwhelming majority.

And the result of all these problems? We have lost sight of the purpose of music theory. Music theory exists to explain why music is beautiful.

Why does this chord sequence appeal to us so powerfully that it gives us spine-tingles, or makes us cry? Why does this rhythm make us want to move our bodies in a certain way?

A Contemporary Piano Collection

Pianodao Music Library
Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales

Publisher Kevin Mayhew’s latest is a beautifully presented collection of 24 original pieces for intermediate to advanced pianists (Grades 4-8), composed by Angeline Bell, Brian Davidson, Ben Eames, Kino Lee, and Andrew Eales.

Yes, that’s me! So, rather than my usual review, this article is more of an introduction to the collection, detailing its contents and publication specifications, with a few pointers to the broader value I see in it.

I’ll also share recordings of my three included pieces, with some brief comments introducing each. Obviously, I hope you will love this collection, so please read on to find out more…

Falla • Serenata andaluza

Pianodao Music Library
Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales

Since its founding in 1948, G. Henle Verlag has established an enviable reputation, its iconic dusty-blue Urtext editions a familiar and esteemed presence in homes, teaching studios, conservatoires, and concert halls around the world.

If Henle’s reputation for meticulous scholarship and exceptional engraving is well established, its openness to innovation is equally commendable. The Henle Library digital initiative, in particular, demonstrates how technology can enhance access to music while remaining true to the publisher’s commitment to quality and aesthetic values.

Over the years, Henle has forged relationships with distinguished musicians, from Claudio Arrau, Arthur Rubinstein and Yehudi Menuhin to more recent collaborators such as András Schiff and Murray Perahia, whose fingerings feature in the publisher’s Bach and Beethoven piano editions respectively.

Today, their print library has expanded to include some 1500 urtext scores, including complete composer editions through to performer-friendly scores of the great core repertoire, in many cases unsurpassed. We might wonder where they might go next.

Enter Henle Horizons, a new imprint that promises to deliver “Discoveries, Arrangements, Studies”, and arrives with burnt orange covers replacing the established dusty blue livery. For pianists, the first two volumes in this new series are Hummel’s Piano Sonata in F# minor Op,81 (which I will review separately) and Manuel de Falla’s delicious Serenata andaluza, the subject of this review.

After introducing the piece itself, this review will focus on the advent of the Henle Horizons series more broadly, exploring how it is distinct from the Henle Urtext editions we know and love…