Since I have been planning for quite a while to win the Florida Lottery
and becoming a Gazillionaire, I have been thinking about how to use some
of the money to benefit Classical Music.  This is, of course, AFTER I
benefit myself.  A generous grant to the Classical Net comes second.

Being the self-crowned Piano Concerto King of Tallahassee, I would want
to add something to the genre.  My initial idea is to commission someone
to arrange the Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op.  56 a and b as
a Piano Concerto.  There aren't too many cases that I know of where we
have an orchestral *and* a 2 piano version of the same piece, done by
the composer.  The only other one that comes to mind is the Rachmaninoff
Symphonic Dances.  Since I don't particularly like this piece, in either
of its guises, I will leave that one to someone else with tons of money.

Getting to my question, how would the repeats be best handled? Would it
be blasphemy to arrange the repeats differently? Could the soloist carry
the melody the first time and let the orchestra have in the repeat?

This seems to somewhat negate the fact that a repeat is a literal replaying
of what went before.  I know that pianists usually don't play a repeat
exactly the same way they play the music the first time around.  Does this
too negate the "repeatedness" of the musical phrase(s)?

Another option might be to have either the soloist or the orchestra play
the repeat alone.  There are many other options, so I wondered what some
of you Pianists and/or composers might think.

Joel Hill
Tallahassee, FL - USA
ALKAN Web Page: http://www.nettally.com/joelhill/alkan/index.html