I’m in the middle of a week almost full of Beethoven, and am enjoying it tremendously (: Two days ago Barry Cooper gave a talk in Manchester, which a friend, knowing my love for Beethoven’s music, very kindly invited me to attend. Dr Cooper showed us examples from Beethoven’s sketchbooks…
“I like Haydn, he’s like a Santa Claus of music..”
0… said my date for the evening, after conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy introduced Haydn’s Symphony No. 92 “Oxford” and mentioned that Haydn had felt at the end of his life that it was his obligation to lift people’s spirits with the gift of music that God had bestowed upon him. The…
“…but Poulenc died almost 50 years ago!”
0.. was what my new piano teacher said, when I told him that the most modern piano music that I’ve played was Poulenc’s. Oops.. I finally had my first piano lesson yesterday, after playing “unsupervised” twice at Performance Class. The feeling of performing on the piano (and not having to…
Thoughts on the Leeds Piano Competition Finals – Day 1
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If there’s anything I learnt from all this, it is never to make an overnight (16-hour) journey, arrive in the city early in the morning, and watch a concert on the same evening. Making things much worse was the number of things I had to get done during the day…