The 10 Best Piano Books for Intermediate Adult Players
There's a moment every returning or self-taught adult pianist reaches, usually a year or two in, where the beginner books stop working. You can read a stave, you know your five-finger positions, you've got pedalling under some kind of control — and suddenly the "beginner-friendly" repertoire on the shelf feels thin. It's written for children still learning what a crotchet is, or it's a simplified arrangement of something you already know deserves better. What an adult intermediate player actually wants at this stage is repertoire with real depth: harmonic colour, rhythmic interest, music that rewards the extra technique you've built rather than ignoring it.
This is where a lot of intermediate piano books quietly let adults down. Adult intermediate players deserve better than both extremes: music that's genuinely satisfying to play and to listen to, pitched at a level that stretches without overwhelming.
With that in mind, here are the ten intermediate books we'd point any adult learner towards, chosen because reviewers consistently describe them as exactly what a grown-up, technically capable player is after — not because they're "easy," but because they're good.
1. Relaxing Piano Intermediate — Piano Hive
We wrote this one as the direct next step for players who'd worked through our earlier beginner books and wanted more. Fifteen original pieces written specifically to "challenge you, develop technique, increase musical knowledge and nurture musicality" while still delivering the calming, de-stressing quality adult players come to us for. Every piece carries Composer Tips flagging the specific technique it's building — so rather than repertoire for its own sake, it's a genuine next rung on the ladder, built around the same principle as all our books: real musical substance, never watered down for the sake of "beginner-friendly."
2. Peaceful Christmas Intermediate — Piano Hive
Fourteen carols and festive favourites, reworked from scratch for the intermediate player. We made this one because the original Peaceful Christmas — aimed at beginners — kept getting requests from adults who wanted the same nostalgic melodies but with more harmonic and technical interest. So these aren't simplified carols; they're proper reharmonisations, each one exploring a different key or chord pattern while staying, as the title promises, genuinely peaceful to play. It's the book we hear about most from adults who want to sit at the piano over the festive period and actually enjoy what comes out, rather than dust off the same Grade 1 arrangement they learned as a child.
3. Ludovico Einaudi – Graded Pieces for Piano: Grades 3–5
The official Einaudi songbook for exactly this level, and arguably the single most requested "sophisticated but achievable" repertoire among adult intermediate players. Twenty pieces matched to genuine Grade 3–5 exam criteria, each preceded by companion exercises targeting the specific technique it needs, with a preface written by Einaudi himself. What sets it apart from generic arrangement books is that these pieces are engraved to retain the emotional weight of the originals — you're not playing a simplified Einaudi, you're playing Einaudi.
4. Alexis Ffrench: Selections from Classical Soul Vol. 1
Seventeen pieces arranged specifically for intermediate to advanced players, capturing Ffrench's signature blend of classical tradition with modern soul and pop harmony. This is the book we recommend to adults who've outgrown "relaxing" repertoire and want something with more emotional and harmonic reach — lyrical, cinematic, genuinely moving to play, and (crucially) never patronising. Reviewers consistently note it as a rewarding step up once Grade 3–4 technique is secure.
5. Play It Again: Piano Book 2 — Melanie Spanswick
The sequel to the beginner-level Book 1, this volume is built for players who once played confidently and are now rebuilding at a higher level — late intermediate through to advanced. Twenty-one pieces drawn from real repertoire spanning Baroque, Classical, Romantic, jazz and ragtime, right up to Rachmaninoff's famous Prelude in C-sharp minor, each with two full pages of practice tips addressing the specific coordination and technique it needs. One reviewer, himself a returning pianist, described it as filling a gap he'd been frustrated by for years: proper material actually tailored to adults, not beginners or unbroken students.
6. Max Richter – Piano Works
Fifteen original compositions, officially arranged and annotated by Richter himself, spanning favourites like The Blue Notebooks and Infra 3. Pitched squarely at intermediate to advanced players, this is contemporary classical writing at its most texturally rich — poetic simplicity layered with genuine rhythmic complexity. It's an excellent choice for the adult player who wants repertoire that demands real interpretive judgement (dynamic control, pedalling, phrasing) rather than just more notes.
7. Contemporary Piano Masters, 2nd Edition
Forty modern piano solos gathered from across the genre — Einaudi, Max Richter, Philip Glass, Yann Tiersen, Agnes Obel and more — arranged specifically to "balance expressive musicality with accessible technique" for the intermediate pianist. If you want one book that surveys the whole contemporary-classical, minimalist landscape rather than committing to a single composer, this is it, and it's a genuinely useful way to find out which of these composers' fuller songbooks you want to explore next.
8. Adult Piano Adventures: All-in-One Course – Book 2 — Nancy & Randall Faber
For the adult who wants structured technical progress alongside their repertoire books, this is still the standard. Book 2 introduces triad inversions, compound time signatures, sixteenth-note rhythms and connected pedalling — folded into real repertoire rather than dry drills — and is explicitly written for players "returning to the piano after formerly playing." It pairs well as a technical backbone alongside any of the more repertoire-led books on this list.
9. The Best of Ludovico Einaudi – Piano Solo Collection
Where the Graded Pieces book above is structured around exam standards, this one is pure repertoire: 35 of Einaudi's original and arranged solos in one collection, aimed squarely at intermediate players who've got the technique in place and now just want the full breadth of his catalogue to draw from. It's the book adult students tend to reach for once they've finished a graded course and want to keep playing purely for pleasure.
10. 100 of the Most Beautiful Piano Solos Ever
We'll end with the broadest of the ten: a hundred intermediate-level solos spanning classical (Clair de Lune, Für Elise), jazz standards, film themes and pop, described by its publisher as offering "musical depth without overwhelming technical difficulty." It's the book we suggest to adults who want variety on the music stand — something different depending on mood — without ever dropping below genuinely satisfying, adult-appropriate repertoire.
Why the "sophisticated, not simplified" distinction matters
As James put it when discussing the philosophy behind our own books: "We like to write by sending musical sketches and ideas back and forth, with the pieces developing with every revision... I often find myself exploring my favourite avenues of harmony." That's the standard intermediate repertoire for adults should be held to — real harmonic interest, not arpeggios recycled from a beginner book with a faster tempo marking. As Janette has said of the same approach: "We're not dumbing down the player — we're aiming at lifting them up."
An adult intermediate player has already put in real hours to get here. They've earned repertoire that reflects that — music with the "sophisticated rhythmic demands," as one reviewer described our series, that popular modern piano writing actually offers: syncopation, jazz-inflected harmony, the freedom to interpret rather than just execute. Every book on this list was chosen because it delivers exactly that, and because real adult players, in their own reviews, said it did.