Mozart Piano Sonata in Bb Major K570: Transcribed for Cello

Here you will find the sheet music and play-along audio accompaniments for Mozart‘s Bb Major Piano Sonata K570 in a transcription for cello with simple accompaniment. The accompaniments are offered in two alternative versions: a simple piano score and a second cello part. The entire sonata has been transposed down by a fourth in order to bring it into an appropriate cello register. This means that the first and third movements are in F major while the slow movement is in Bb major.

MOVEMENT I: Allegro

We can have a tempo problem with this movement. If we choose our tempo based on the music of the first 34 bars, the arrival of the virtuoso 16th-note passage at bar 35 (and other passages later) will give us a big fright when we suddenly realise that these 16th-notes are very fast. Our options to resolve this problem are quite limited:

• we can choose our starting tempo according to our ability to play the 16th-note passages, which, unless we have very fast fingers, might make the rest of the movement sound a little slow, or
• we can choose an appropriate base (starting) tempo for the movement and then slow down slightly in the 16th-note passages

Here is the downloadable/printable sheet music for this movement

1.  Edited Version
2.    Clean Version
3.    Easier Version
4.    Accompaniment Score (Piano)

1. Cello Duo Version (Study Score)
2.    Accompaniment Part For Second Cello
3.    Easier Second Cello Accompaniment

1.   Engraving Files (XML)

Here are two play-along audio piano accompaniments for this movement. The first is at a slower, practice tempo. Both have a two-bar introduction and both take a suddenly slightly slower tempo for the 16th-note passages.

And here is an audio recording of this movement played (as a piano sonata) by Walter Klien. It has been transposed into our cello key and slowed down so that we can play along with it if we want:

MOVEMENT II: Adagio

What a delight it is to play these slow movements by Mozart. Although this one, like so many of his slow movements, begins very quietly and simply, like a whisper or a murmur, it doesn’t take long before we can start singing our heart out.

In this movement, six musical sections are repeated. Although Mozart notated them with simple repeats, we have chosen to write them all out (instead of using repeat signs) in order to be able to play the repetitions with different dynamics, fingerings and sometimes even different bowings. If we play both repetitions of each section identically, the music risks becoming too predictable. To avoid confusion with original editions, the bar numbers in these written-out repeats have an “A” added to them.

With all these repeats and its very slow Adagio tempo, the movement becomes very long – more than eight minutes – so we may want to do like Walter Klien and remove the longest repeat (bars 17-24). Here is his version of this movement, played on the piano but in our cello key in case we would like to play-along with him:

Here is the downloadable/printable sheet music for this movement:

1.  Edited Version
2.    Clean Version
3.     Easier Version
4.     Accompaniment Score (Piano)

1.  Cello Duo Version (Study Score)
2.    Accompaniment Part For Second Cello

1.    Engraving Files (XML)

Here is an audio accompaniment, played on the guitar. There is a two-beat (four 8th-notes) introduction:

And here is a home recording of this movement played on the cello by the transcriber, with the cellofun guitar play-along accompaniment.