Recommended products
Staff Picks: July 2026
- 20 Jul 2026
Welcome to Schott Staff Picks, a monthly roundup where our ragtag team of musicians, music lovers, and afficionados pick out their favourite sheet music titles, both old and new. Whether it's beloved classics, contemporary soundtracks from our film fans, jazz standards from icons, or folk tunes from all sorts of composers and artists, our selection aims to cover every style, instrument, and difficult level.
So have a look at our picks for July 2026 below, and expect our honest, personal takes, including anecdotes, historical context, tips, and whatever else we think of as we recommend whatever might be piquing our interest!
RECOMMENDED BY ALISON
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
Maurice Ravel
Barenreiter have published an excellent edition of the Ravel Piano Concerto. With their trademark wide cream-toned pages, this edition makes every note clear. This is the piano reduction with the orchestral reduction played by the second piano.
This Bärenreiter publication, an urtext edition edited by Douglas Woodfull-Harris, includes an introduction focusing on ‘inception, early performances and reception’ and the history of publications and recordings.
The first night of the Proms 2026 features Ravel’s Piano Concerto on Friday 17th July.
View in store
Clarinet Concerto
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
This seemingly little-known concerto by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov is a rare gem in the clarinet repertoire. It’s not long, nor terribly technically difficult, but it is so, so beautiful and has lots of space for the player to try out different approaches to expression. I would recommend it for clarinettists Grade 4 and up looking for something that falls under the fingers without too much trouble that you can revel in the joy of playing!
View in store
RECOMMENDED BY ELLE
Movie & TV At The Piano
Patrik Pietschmann
To mark the release of Christopher Nolan’s latest film epic, The Odessey, I’d like to highlight the only book that publishes the now viral ‘Cornfield Chase’ by Hans Zimmer from Interstellar, another of Nolan’s films. This book collects favourites of Patrik Pietschmann's arrangements, a German YouTuber who transcribes famous themes for more than two million subscribers. His arrangements are thorough but playable for intermediate to advanced pianists.
Pietschmann takes pains to do justice to the original music and showcases modern classics, including Pirates of the Caribbean and Gladiator, as well as newly streamed shows, like The Witcher. For a taste of Oscar winner Ludwig Göransson’s music, who composed the music for Nolan’s The Odyssey, his theme from The Mandalorian is also featured.
View in store
The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Piano Anthology
Howard Shore
It's been almost 25 years since the The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring hit cinemas and became an instant classic. The resulting trilogy was so well received that at the Academy Awards in 2004 it managed to make history in two ways; first it overcame the academy's inclination to overlook fantasy in film; and then it walked away with 11 Oscars, matching the likes of Titanic (1997) and Ben Hur (1959). The magic of these films, and the Hobbit trilogy that followed a decade later, is in all the contributions made by a massive cast and crew, not least of which was its composer, Howard Shore.
Shore's soundtrack contains multitudes in a way unlike most other franchise films, with leitmotifs provided for places, characters, peoples, themes, and so on. Not to mention how these develop, overlap and interact over the course of the three films. The resulting soundtrack is nothing short of a modern masterpiece, and deserves all its flowers.
In case it's not obvious, I'm a pretty big Lord of the Rings fan, so this piano anthology from Faber Music had me a little excited. Containing 40 tracks from across the two trilogies, it includes various songs like "Concerning Hobbits", "In Dreams", "May it Be", "Evenstar", "Into the West", and so many more, all arranged for intermediate level pianists, helping them in their journey back to Middle Earth.
View in store
Related Posts
