Number Two

Number Two, No. 2, or similar may refer to:

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Piano Suite No. 2 (Enescu)

The Suite No. 2 for piano, Op. 10, is the second composed by George Enescu between 1901 and 1903, being written in 1903 in Paris. It was published in 1904, and is dedicated to Louis Diémer.

The Toccata was written starting in 1901 and completed by three other movements for presentation at a competition in 1903, in which it won first prize. The judges included, notably, Claude Debussy and Vincent d'Indy. It is a composition that shows a French-style neoclassicism, the musician himself recognizing the influence of Debussy, but Enescu's Romanian folklore is not absent, rather, unobtrusive.

Divided into four parts, a performance requires about twenty minutes.

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Georges Bizet

Georges Bizet (French: [ʒɔʁʒ bizɛ]; 25 October 1838 – 3 June 1875), registered at birth as Alexandre César Léopold Bizet, was a French composer of the romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, which has become one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertoire.

During a brilliant student career at the Conservatoire de Paris, Bizet won many prizes, including the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1857. He was recognised as an outstanding pianist, though he chose not to capitalise on this skill and rarely performed in public. Returning to Paris after almost three years in Italy, he found that the main Parisian opera theatres preferred the established classical repertoire to the works of newcomers. His keyboard and orchestral compositions were likewise largely ignored; as a result, his career stalled, and he earned his living mainly by arranging and transcribing the music of others. Restless for success, he began many theatrical projects during the 1860s, most of which were abandoned. Neither of his two operas that reached the stage in this time—Les pêcheurs de perles and La jolie fille de Perth—were immediately successful.

Suite No. 1 (Rachmaninoff)

Suite No. 1 (or Fantaisie-Tableaux for two pianos), Op. 5, is a composition for two pianos by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Composed in the summer of 1893 at the Lysikofs estate in Lebeden, Kharkov, this suite was initially titled Fantaisie-Tableux since Rachmaninoff intended it, as he explained in a letter to his cousin Sofia Satin, to consist "of a series of musical pictures." While François-Rene Tranchefort asserts that the music illustrates four extracts of poems (written by Mikhail Lermontov, Lord Byron, Fyodor Tyutchev and Aleksey Khomyakov), Rachmaninoff biographer Max Harrison counters that while the poems "convey something of the emotional tone of the music," the music itself is not programmatic.

This work was first performed on November 30, 1893, by Rachmaninoff and Pavel Pabst in Moscow, and is dedicated to Tchaikovsky. Rachmaninoff composed a second suite in 1901.

The four movements are:

I. Barcarolle. Allegretto, in G minor.
II. La nuit... L'amour... Adagio sostenuto, in D major. (The night...the love...)
III. Les Larmes. Largo di molto, in G minor. (The Tears)
IV. Pâques. Allegro maestoso, in G minor. (Easter)

Surname

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The concept of a "surname" is a relatively recent historical development, evolving from a medieval naming practice called a "byname". Based on an individual's occupation or area of residence, a byname would be used in situations where more than one person had the same name.