An old idea… a new perspective

Further to my earlier thoughts about the nature of art, I notice an interesting way in which the idea of scientific rigor and has spilled over into the creative disciplines.
One of the great triumphs of the scientific method is that it is by nature a communal process and therefore far less prone to error than [...]

Several years ago, Gramophone, the venerable classical music publication, did the world a great service by digitizing pretty much everything they ever printed, allowing visitors to their website to search for articles going as far back as the 1920s. Tonight I was browsing through the archives looking for reviews of Glenn Gould’s recordings dating from [...]

While reading a review of a recently-released CD of music by Chopin, I came across the following:

One of the highlights is the B major Nocturne. A delicate flower, this, with middle-ground rhythms so diffuse that most pianists, fancying it as an opportunity for rubatissimo, render the whole thing practically incomprehensible.

Even after accepting that the reviewer’s [...]

Reading through the most recent issue of International Piano, I came across an article describing the latest Van Cliburn competition. Naturally the focus was on the controversy generated by choosing a blind pianist, Nobuyuki Tsujii, as one of the gold medallists and also on the fact that all the winners are very young (19, 20 [...]

My next recording project is most likely going to be the third volume of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage, written in the last decade or so of the master’s life. An oft-overlooked but incredibly important aspect of Liszt’s personality and art was his deep religious devotion. He had a strong connection with Catholicism even in his [...]