Gift ideas for music lovers: Hallé\'s Christmas Celebration CD, the new jSax for only £79, plus Einaudi sheet music, piano stools and musical bottle openers
We can no longer kid ourselves that it’s too soon to think about Christmas. Make it easier on yourself this year by starting early and stepping into our historic musical haven in the heart of Manchester.
We are the oldest independent business in the city, run by the same family since 1857, and our musical department store at our five-storey premises on Deansgate offers instruments, sheet music, recordings and accessories – as well as restoration and publishing services – for every type of musician and music lover.
Whether you’re shopping for gifts or making your own preparations for the holidays, here are a few ideas to get you started.
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Recorded Music Department
HALLÉ – A Christmas Celebration
Hallé, Hallé Choir, Hallé Youth Choir & Hallé Children’s Choir
Stephen Bell (conductor)
£11.60 (was £14.50)
The Hallé’s latest release finally lets us take home the brilliance of their ever-popular annual Christmas concerts, which this year take place on 17-18 December just down the road at the Bridgewater Hall.
Bringing together the whole Hallé ‘family’, with the youth and children’s choirs joining the professional choir and symphony orchestra, their equally all-encompassing programme ranges from 14th-century In Dulci Jubilo to Roderick Elm’s Noel!, premiered by the Hallé in 2013. Here choral favourites such as O Holy Night, Rutter’s Angels’ Carol and In the Bleak Midwinter are mixed with orchestral extracts from Prokofiev’s Winter Bonfire and The Snow Maiden by Rimsky-Korsakov.
And since we all have different ideas about Christmas, this album lets us escape the wintry weather with Christmas on the Beach at Waikiki, embrace it with Sleigh Ride, or just shut it out with John Williams’s score to Home Alone…
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Sheet Music Department
EINAUDI – Islands (Essential Einaudi)
– In a Time Lapse
– The Easiest Original Pieces
£14.95 · £14.95 · £9.95
Among the 30,000 titles in stock in the sheet music department – serving performers of classical, rock, pop, jazz and folk alike – the works of Ludovico Einaudi remain popular with all types of musician.
As The Independent observed on the release of his 2013 album In a Time Lapse, “there’s a deeply satisfying emotional logic to his piano-based progressions that makes him as much the inheritor of Chopin and Satie as minimalists such as Glass and Reich.”
If you are new to Einaudi, a good place to start would be 2011’s Islands, a retrospective of his best-loved material, while if you’re already a fan but relatively new to the piano, The Easiest Original Pieces is for you.
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Musical Gifts Department
Treble & Bass Clefs BOTTLE OPENER
£9.50
We don’t just supply the accessories you need for making music: on the ground floor you will find music-themed accessories and gifts for every other aspect of your life too, including cooking and entertaining.
Get ready to bake end-of-term biscuits for your music teacher or colleagues with our Mozart-shaped cookie cutters, Für Elise oven gloves, and a fresh supply of Russian composer napkins or Soviettes.
Or just get ready for the day with coffee in an official Beatles mug: you can even stir in your sugar with a ‘Flying Tea’ spoon shaped like a Flying V guitar. For something stronger, we’ve just got in this new metal bottle opener, blurring together the treble and bass clefs.
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Piano Department
Single Adjustable PIANO STOOL by CGM (125ET)
£189
Do you know someone struggling on at the piano with an old hand-me-down stool that could give way at any moment, or a chair from the dining room fixed at the wrong height? Or could you do with a second stool so you can play duets with friends or students?
A comfortable stool that supports you in the correct position is essential for playing freely and avoiding injury.
Here is our most popular model. Being factory-assembled in Italy, it is more robust than flat-packed alternatives, from which the legs can work loose, and it is available with a range of woods, finishes and seat coverings.
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Guitar and Musical Instrument Department
JSAX by Nuvo
£79
The saxophone has always been wildly popular with children but the size and cost of the traditional instrument has often prevented them from taking it up. Now Nuvo, the specialists in quality plastic instruments, have created a gateway instrument designed to be as accessible as the recorder.
Pitched in C and with similar fingering to the recorder, the jSax allows children to get started immediately by playing music they have already learned on recorder, and to continue playing together with other children without having to transpose as they would on the alto saxophone (in Eb).
In this way, the jSax enables children to try out the saxophone’s key mechanism and the necessary embouchure before they decide whether to pursue the full saxophone – and before parents need to decide whether to invest in one.
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Posted On: Nov 22, 2016
Categories: The Forsyths Blog