The once-mighty Franco-Belgian school of violin playing suffered something of a thin time in the post-war years. In Belgium, Alfred Dubois died in 1949, aged only 50, leaving his pupil Arthur Grumiaux on a lonely eminence. In France, air crashes claimed Ginette Neveu in 1949, aged 30, and Jacques Thibaud in 1953, aged 72. Fine […]
When Jörg Demus died in April 2019, aged 90, he was remembered by one Austrian obituarist as ‘the ballet-master of ten fingers’. Many pupils from his classes at his own alma mater of the Wiener Akademie paid affectionate tributes to a dry and lively man, equipped with a cynical, quick-witted, typically Viennese turn of mind, […]
BY ROB COWAN (Re-published with permission from the author HERE) A PERSONAL PRELUDE Among my most valued formative musical experiences from the late 1960s was the year I spent working for what had recently been called the BBC Third Programme but was by then Radio 3. The department I was assigned to, Concerts Management, dealt […]
Mark Ainley surveys the artistry of Greek pianist Gina Bachauer, to mark the release of her complete Mercury Living Presence recordings. Many pianists are impossible to classify and fit no school. Gina Bachauer was one of these… unlike most modern pianists she was a romantic with a virtuoso approach to the keyboard…. She played in […]
What The Critics Said VOLUME 1 “Judging from the first releases by him and the newly resuscitated Detroit Symphony Orchestra, [Paray] should soon come into his own. His reading of this much-played symphony is a thrill from start to finish.” High Fidelity, November 1953 (Franck) “Once again, Paray reveals his mastery at interpreting modern French […]
Peter Quantrill shares his thoughts on this remarkable chamber music group DOWNLOAD FULL BOX SET BOOKLET HERE Nonconformism in the Low Countries has taken many forms. To pass quickly over only its salient manifestations in the history of music, the country already enjoyed a liberal conservative culture when the English composer Peter Philips escaped to […]
MICHAEL GRAY explores the Wilhelm Kempff legacy Wilhelm Kempff began recording for Deutsche Grammophon (DG) in the autumn of 1922. (Kempff is quoted as saying he began recording in 1920. However, his first record falls within DG’s matrix series for discs made in the autumn of 1922.) Before 1916, DG had been the German branch […]
On the occasion of Wolfgang Holzmair’s 70th birthday, Imogen Cooper pays tribute to the man and musician. It is close on 30 years since Wolfgang and I rehearsed for our first concert. It was in a little church in Steinbach, on the Attersee in the Austrian Salzkammergut. We were to perform the Schubert Schwanengesang and […]
“I still remember the time when I played Rachmaninov’s Piano Concert No. 3 for the first time in London in 2001. After the concert, he gave me a hug with tears in his eyes, and said that he had high hopes for me. Master Fou was a great artist that I respected very much. I […]
Piers Lane writes about the winner of the 2021 Sydney International Piano Competition – the first to be held online – a selection of whose live recordings are released on Decca Eloquence. What an exciting time it was in January 2020! I had appointed four experienced musicians to listen along with me to the 285 […]
Peter Quantrill examines the Decca legacy of the British conductor, responsible for one of the first complete Sibelius symphony cycles to be recorded. Violinists have often left the leader’s chair and stepped on to the podium. Sir John Barbirolli and Arturo Toscanini number among the most distinguished cellists who swapped bows for batons. A rarer […]
Piers Lane reflects on the Sydney International Piano Competition What were you doing in July 1977? If you were in Australia and a piano-lover, you were probably heading for Sydney or tuned into ABC Radio, the national broadcaster, because the new Sydney International Piano Competition was big news and you didn’t want to miss it. […]
