Me and Jo-chieh playing Percy Grainger duet on YouTube

 Country Gardens, recorded 19th May 2014 at my teaching studio in Tienmu, Taipei.

Great sense of rhythm! Goldenweiser and Ginzburg.

Rhythm is elusive. If you play just like a metronome it can sound just like a robot.
Rhythm should have a lusty sense of vitality, like a horse breathing, in a positive sense!

The best two pianists for rhythm that I have heard in recording are Rachmaninoff and Percy Grainger. The two have some genealogy in common: despite living half-way round the world from each other, they had related teachers (in Russia and Australia respectively)  brothers Pavel and Louis Pabst. Here is a two-piano piece by Rachmaninoff, dedicated to Goldenweiser, and performed by Goldenweiser with the astonishing pianist's pianist Grigory Ginzburg.
If you find your finger or toe tapping along, conducting in time with the music, you know that the performers can indeed say "I got rhythm!"

PS aficianados will find great interest in this interview with Ginzburg tucked away in the internet...
 interview with ginzburg.pdf

Pianistic snobbery?!

We can be very snobbish in our approach to pianists.
Sometimes we are put off by the gossip surrounding a pianist, or by their appearance, or their nationality. This makes it harder for us to simply listen to their musical performances.

The problem is perhaps - how hard it is to simply listen to music! Listening, like meditating, it is simple to say and hard to do. Both activities involve physical passivity; an emphasis on our inner world; and a determination to ignore the petty complaints of our own mental policeman. Two thorny old examples: the nine wives of Nyiereghazy seem to put some people off that amazing Hungarian; and Maria Callas' romances confuse many people from listening with their soul to her singing.

Here are two AMAZING pianists from down under who deserved much much better: Geoffrey Tozer and Noel Mewton Wood, both from Australia.

Geoffrey Tozer is one of VERY few pianists of recent years who seem to play like a Golden Age pianist: a golden sonority; a loose-limbed flexibility assisting virtuosity; an emphasis on conveying mood rather than on hitting the right notes in a tight and controlled way.
If you watch how relaxed (keeps breathing!) and musical he is while navigating the scarifying parts of Paul de Schlozer’s etude: fluidity to die for, and I’m sorry to say that so many currently celebrated virtuosi are not even approaching the same league.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYs3BPmGMBg&feature=related


Noel Mewton Wood - the Classical piano world’s answer to Nick Drake. He committed suicide aged 31 by swallowing prussic acid, on learning of the death of a friend. Yikes. But just give him a chance: his Weber sonata no 2 could hardly be bettered - the warm tone, the gorgeous pedalling, the superb phrasing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGxtFIE5AX0&playnext=1&list=PLBEA66FDF7BB14896

If he were an 18-year old Russian prize winner, performed Chopin Polonaises, and dated a secretary at ICA, for sure we would listen more easily. How fashion -driven are our two ears!

Perhaps their two chief forbears in the Australian lineage are Eileen Joyce and Percy Grainger:

Eileen Joyce can be seen here performing Grieg, again with admirable freedom, musicality in abundance and joie de vivre:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeAp512sdGs&feature=related

Percy Grainger seems to be undergoing a long overdue image rehabilitation, his recording of the Chopin B minor sonata remains one of the finest ever made, no easy achievement!

PIano Playing Awards 2009

Piano music is " An international language that every nation knows and feels. Schumann calls it the language of soul to soul"
(Simon Barere, radio interview, New Zealand, 1947).
Here are a few highlights for you to enjoy. In the next couple of months I will turn this into a competition for you to vote on your favourite item in different categories.

Best Composer's Piano Playing

First Prize: The Master of Twentieth Century Piano Playing
Rachmaninoff performs his own Elegie Op3:3. Genius Comes Into Your Living Room

Grieg plays his own PIano Sonata. Such naturalness of heartfelt expression, such alive phrasing.

Best Live Performance
Josef Hofmann, Chopin G Minor Ballade, Carnegie Hall 50th Birthday recital.
"There is a technique which liberates and a technique which represses the artistic self. All technique should be a means of expression". (Hofmann, "Piano Playing' 1909, publ. Doubleday).

Best piano playing
Vladimir Sofronitzky plays Scriabin. Married to the daughter of Scriabin after the composer's death. It sounds as if the music is being revealed for the first time, spun out by some mysterious alchemy.

Best transcription performance, three entries:
Josef Lhevinne plays Schulz-Evler's transciption of Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz. Such flawless and musical virtuosity. Those who claim the modern pianist is superior technically to the golden age pianists should study Josef Lhevinne.

Myra Hess plays Bach
A world war 2 legend: while england was at war, London's cultural activity immediately ceased; but pianist Myra Hess persuaded the National Gallery to open its doors to allow weekly lunchtime recitals of music.

Percy Grainger plays Tchaikovksy "Sugar plum fairy". Wonderful playing from the pianist beloved by Grieg.
When on tour, he used to jog from one american city to the next. Didn't he even care about air miles?

How to Play the Piano
Such freedom of the upper arm! Such naturalness! Such breath! Such lovely printed fabric! We bow.
Magda Tagliaferro Saint Saens Concerto 5

Most disturbing recorded fragment
Bela Bartok playing Chopin Nocturne in C sharp minor
Did a minor key ever sound this spooky? Did the bogeyman abduct the musician?

Loveliest tone award: after 0.50.
Alexander Siloti's was a favourite pupil of Liszt. Some said he was more than equal to the great Rachmaninoff, and this playing has such a warm, living tone, like the golden voice of a tenor, characteristic of the finest Russian-school pianism.

Erwin Nyiereghazy (at 6.53) Liszt Legend 2. I believe this is how Liszt himself performed - free, full of imagination, wild, strong, passionate, individual, spiritual, heartfelt, with never a care for the judgemental bourgeoisie.

Best virtuoso playing: (three contestants)
Alfred Cortot playing Saint-Saens Etude en forme de Valse
Horowitz went to him for a lesson but Cortot would not reveal the secrets of his lightness within power!

Ignaz Friedman playing Chopin Etude in C at 3.05

Dinu Lipatti making light work of Liszt

Best Chopin Nocturne
Moriz Rosenthal Chopin D flat major. Rosenthal studied with Liszt AND with a favourite pupil of Chopin's; so his style deserves to be treated with the greatest respect, even though it may appear too personal for the modern ear.
Ideal for the moonlit reverie with your beloved (and/or hot water bottle).

Best Folk-Style Playing
Ignaz Friedman Chopin Mazurka
Such rhythm and mood! Spot on! 100%. Now if this spirit and lifetime's learning could be sold in a bottle...

Bela Bartok plays his own Rumanian Folk Dances
How wonderful! How humble! How truly civilised! Such musical phrasing! Bravo Hungary! (And Rumania).

Best 2-piano Playing: Arensky, Waltz from Suite, played by Harold Bauer and Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Wow! Did you know that Ravel dedicated Ondine from Gaspard de la Nuit to Harold Bauer?

Best Left Hand
Simon Barere plays Blumenfeld's Etude for the Left Hand in A flat major opus 36 at 2.45