My friend the great Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire sent me this link a few days ago without comment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8SofSH-Whk&feature=share Here’s my comment. As you can see, it’s an unpublished performance of Liszt’s Totentanz conducted by Rafael Kubelik with Freire as soloist. For me this is the most thrilling, convincing performance of the work I have ever…
To the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Wednesday evening for Benjamin Grosvenor’s first recital there. Barely twenty years old, he’s already a media star due to his own exceptional abilities and canny management and marketing. What makes him stand out from his peers is his complete but unfashioable affinity with the repertoire and style of playing of the…
Over forty years ago, I started collecting material about Leopold Godowsky: newspaper clippings, magazine articles, references in autobiographies, recordings and music. To cut a very long story short and fourteen publisher rejections later, the book finally appeared between hard covers in 1989 thanks to Bryan Crimp of APR. During the four years prior to…
Someone once said there are two sorts of people in the world: those who divide the world into two sorts of people and those who don’t. Now call it a crude generalisation or a silly party game for pianoraks or, as I like to think, brilliantly perceptive, but I think you can divide concert pianists…
I don’t think I had sat through The Yeoman of the Guard since I was a small boy taken, as I often was, to the Theatre Royal, Hanley, to see the D’Oyly Carte Company on tour in the 1950s. Whereas I can still sing most of The Mikado, much of The Gondoliers and quite a…
(this article is published online by Gramophone magazine) During the thirteen years of their almost exclusive collaboration, George and Ira Gershwin produced nearly one thousand songs, for a dozen shows and four films. Imagine the fruits of that partnership if George had been granted even ten more years – let alone forty. Someone once…
Shakespeare’s plays (like opera) rarely work on the small screen. Even in the cinema they tend to be heavy-handed with performances played at the same level as on stage. The production of Richard 11 on Saturday night (BBC2) was a shining, magnificent exception. On every level – performances, costumes, direction, decor, lighting, editing, verse speaking – the…
A few weeks ago I interviewed the distinguished pianist and teacher Hamish Milne for one of the magazines I write for (and incidentally if you haven’t heard his latest two-disc set for Hyperion of short piano works by Medtner you really should). One of the things he said was that when he is asked, as…
Even for those familiar with the favelas of Caracas, ending up on a stretch of waste ground in the middle of a council estate in Raploch must have been a bit of a teeth-grinder. At least there would have been sun in Caracas – and an audience. Here, beneath the glowering Stirling Castle, a couple…
Resurrecting the second division 19th century composers. In his opening number, the eponymous Mikado in Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta sings of the music-hall singer who attends a series of ‘masses and fugues and ’ops / By Bach, interwoven / With Spohr and Beethoven, / At classical Monday Pops.’ Yes, Ludwig (or Louis as he called…