Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #127346 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback

Customer Reviews

All songs from the musical included. Easy? Mostly
I ordered this book after seeing the London show of "Joseph" and wanting to 'take home' something from it.
The most pleasing thing after I received the booklet (25 pages) was to discover that it actually includes (as far as I recall them) all songs from the musical. Everybody's favourites like "Any Dream Will Do" and "Close Every Door" as well as less known titles like "Who's the Thief?" and "Jacob in Egypt".
The level of difficulty is stated as "for easy piano", which I would consider to be accurate. It's not "very easy", you'll need at least a bit of practice on the instrument to handle the songs. I especially had slight problems with the left hand at first and found it a bit more difficult than the right hand notation, but since my piano skills are more or less self-taught I'm sure that's the teacher's fault ;)
So, not to worry: no insurmountable obstacles are put in your way. And even if the compositions had of course to be simplyfied so they would be easier to play they don't sound 'boring' or 'cheap' but still are the real thing.
Altogether a great collection of truly beautiful songs, perfect for bringing back memories of the show.

What is there is good, but a lot is missing
This book contains pretty much all the songs from the show. Unfortunately with 17 songs in a book of just 25 pages, there is very little room for each song. In many cases a song is condensed to just one verse and a chorus. No extra lyrics are provided for other verses, and the repeats are not shown. In some cases it is possible to figure out where the repeats go and play the whole song, but really they ought to be marked and not rely on the player to work them out.

Some songs have not just repeats, but large chunks of the music missing. A couple of the songs (Those Canaan Days and Benjamin Calypso) are just two lines of music. I would almost rather these songs were missed out completely than being so heavily edited.

On the plus side, the music that is there looks good, though I haven't played much of it yet. It's not the easiest "easy piano" book that I've seen, but it doesn't look especially hard.

In conclusion, what you get is good, but the book feels like it's crammed into 25 pages. Why couldn't the publishers have just added a few more pages and expanded the songs to something nearer their full versions?