Ah, the Beauty and the Beast Prologue is just such a cool piece. "Tale As Old As Time" always gets all the love, but fellow instrumentalists will know, this Prologue is UNDER appreciated. It's got the goods: So many notes, drama, lots more notes, romance, and even more notey goodness! So amazing.
Originally written for piano and orchestra, we tried to retain as many of the notes as possible (yep, those notes we were talking about up there) from the part and get them all on violin and cello. Like those faster moving notes in the beginning that are so magical. They usually are left out of most violin arrangements, but here every one of them is kept exactly as intended. This still stands as one of our most epic arrangements for violin and cello rivaled only by a few (like "You're A Mean One, Mister Grinch" is that a trio? maybe a quartet? No, that's just a crazy feat of dueting 😎).
In fact, when we first arranged the Beauty and the Beast Prologue, Julia wasn't entirely sure if all of it was possible to pull off. (How do some of these notes fit on violin???) But one role you take on as an arranger is finding solutions when confronted with "playability". It's not always obvious at first glance if something will work in the long run (ouch, those are my fingers and they have feelings too!") But we tend to live by an unspoken (kind of spoken) rule. Once we have something written down in our music, we MUST figure out how to play it. So, that's how this cover was born.
If you enjoyed this video and blog, you can check out "Greensleeves and Variations" for Violin and Cello.
You can also stream Duo.Hansen's "Beauty and the Beast Prologue" for Violin and Cello on Spotify!
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