Acclaimed as one of the greatest interpreters of Mozart, Portuguese/Brazilian pianist Maria-João Pires (b. 1944) is an artist who combines exquisite stylistic refinement with a serious effort to plumb the intellectual complexities and spiritual depths of music. Refusing to conform to the traditional image of a concert virtuoso, Pires emphasizes the spiritual dimensions of music, always searching for hidden meanings […]

A century ago, before the world was so flat, national styles of music making were a given. The French school of pianism, for example, was known for its fleet technique and lyrical delicacy – the aural equivalent, perhaps, of the nation’s haute cuisine. NEW! Click the album cover to listen to the complete album: (This is a new feature available […]

Schumann: Kreisleriana opus 16 Though a successful pianist, conductor, and composer in his lifetime, the late Nicholas Economou (1953-93) is probably best remembered for the empathic collaboration he provided Martha Argerich on numerous pieces for piano duet. But Argerich is certainly not one to choose her partners lightly, and this early ’80s solo concert shows that Economou deserves greater remembrance. […]

“Piano Masterclass” sketch from “Hysteria! Hysteria! Hysteria!” AIDS benefit, featuring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in 1988. Fry and Laurie are Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, a successful English comedy double act mostly active in the 1980s and 1990s. Having met in 1980 through mutual friend Emma Thompson (whilst all attended the University of Cambridge), Fry and Laurie have since […]

Chopin composed about 200 works. 110 were dances such as mazurkas, waltzes and polonaises. At the age of seven, he composed his first polonaise in B-flat major, and throughout his career he made the form exclusively his own, overshadowing the early examples by Oginski and Kurpinski. Chopin’s mature polonaises form a heroic national epic. In these works, Chopin’s patriotism envisions […]

“And now, in honour of the 150th anniversary of Beethoven’s death, I would like to play “Clear the Saloon”, er, “Clair de Lune”, by Debussy. I don’t play Beethoven so well, but I play Debussy very badly, and Beethoven would have liked that.” “I’m going to play it with both hands so that way I will get through with it […]

Second Life (SL) is a virtual world developed by Linden Lab launched on June 23, 2003, and is accessible on the Internet. A free client program called the Viewer enables its users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property […]

From the International Musicians’ Seminar, Prussia Cove, we here present a clip from a Masterclass on targeting characters between movements. Schiff also works on the disposition of form in order to rightfully serve the rhetoric qualities in Bach playing. In this particular Masterclass, András Schiff works with a student on Bach’s Second Partita for Keyboard, one of a set of […]

Hans Liberg has received many international awards, the highest being an Emmy Award in New York in 1997 for “Liberg zaps himself”, produced by Ivo Niehe for Tros Television. In the same year he was also nominated for the Banff Television Festival in Canada and he received an honourable mention at the Golden Rose Festival in Montreux. In 1998 he […]

The name Ivan Moravec (b.1930) is held in high respect by executants and connoisseurs. The Czech pianist’s recordings for Connoisseur Society were notable for their audiophile quality and nearly all of them remain available, long after the LP era, on CD reissues. Moravec has also recorded for several other labels including Vox, Dorian, Hänssler, and Supraphon. In 1998 a 2-CD […]

“Towards the Light” — Director Oliver Becker’s Alexander Scriabin Documentary from 1996 This documentary on the unconventional life and ground-breaking music of Russian pianist and composer Alexander Scriabin sheds light on the mystical ideas which inspired him. He became consumed by a vision of a union of the arts, a coalescence of music, words, movement, light, colour and ideas , […]

In a live recording from the Amerikahaus, Munich, Friedrich Gulda reveals the versatility of his keyboard playing. On the clavichord he plays three preludes and fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (in A minor BWV 889, in C major BWV 846, in A flat major BWV 886) on the piano; his own re-working of Schubert’s song Der Wanderer, ending with Debussy’s […]