Pianist

Near the end of last year I attended an astounding recital by Arcadi Volodos. Oh, how it feels like half a lifetime away. Just a few months later, the world is a different place, and the doors to the Barbican and all our other culture palaces are fir

Filling in my diary at the start of the year, I noted down Yuja Wang at the Barbican in March, the launch of the BBC Proms in April, the Arthur Rubinstein Piano Competition in Tel Aviv in May. You will have had red-letter dates of your own. Diaries e

Back in February – which seems an age away now – I found myself at a very special debut in Glasgow. Th e Russian pianist Zlata Chochieva was playing a concerto in the UK for the first time, with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. As she sparkled an

If you could play only one piece from now on, what would it be? Rachmaninov Piano Sonata No 1. If you could play only the music of one composer from now on, who would it be? Rachmaninov. One pianist you’d travel long and far to hear? Rachmaninov! One

For singers and single line instrumentalists, the idea of phrasing musically becomes an important topic from early on in the learning process. As soon as a young recorder player is able to connect two notes together, we have the beginnings of a music

When learning a new piece or maintaining a piece that is in our active repertoire, one of the biggest obstacles to reaching our goal is not appreciating the difference between the process of practising and the act of performing (or playing through).

Kathryn Page has appeared in concert and on television as a soloist and in chamber music. She is a teacher, adjudicator and administrator for Chetham’s International Summer School and Festival for Pianists, as well as the Manchester International Con

Key: C major Tempo: Allegretto Style: Romantic Will improve your: ✔ Clarity ✔ Agility ✔ Legato Agility of the LH is the focus in this study by German composer Hermann Berens. A smooth legato touch in the RH is also necessary, though, so a fine balanc

Key: A major Tempo: Moderate speed in a singing style Style: Romantic Will improve your: ✔Voicing of chords ✔Silent finger changes ✔Pedalling Schumann had a skill of thinking himself into different roles. His educational music is perfectly judged for

Key: F minor Tempo: Waltz Style: Late Romantic Will improve: ✔ Tonal palette ✔ Use of articulations ✔ Sense of ebb and flow This charming Valse is a wonderful example of Debussy’s early writing. It was composed in 1890, the same year in which another

This feisty exercise belongs to a set of 100 exercises which German composer Cornelius Gurlitt wrote for young students. The set was first published in 1877. If only 16 bars in length, it is not short on detail. This being the case, one should learn

In the sixth and final lesson of this series, John Geraghty wraps things up by taking a look at thirteenth chords, and demonstrates how to harmonise any piece of music with these chords In the last lesson (issue 113), you learned how to create eleven

Pedalling is such a huge topic, you could write a book about it. In fact, people have, among them the pianist Alexander Bukhovtsev who, in 1896, wrote Guide to the Proper Use of the Pianoforte Pedals (Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-42782-X), using ex

Hearing loss, sometimes avoidable, often the gift of advancing years, has ended the careers of too many fine musicians and blighted those of others. The subject remains one of the great taboos among professional performers – a burden never to be shar

One of the most exciting things about the Pianist Composing Competition is the moment when the judges know they’re on to a winner. We look at each other – that’s me, musician Alexis Ffrench, composer John Kember, music educator Nigel Scaife and piani

At the end of 1967, Dave Brubeck disbanded his famous quartet. Ever since 1958, when the group’s line-up stabilised around Brubeck (piano), Paul Desmond (alto saxophone), Eugene Wright (bass) and Joe Morello (drums), the ‘classic’ Dave Brubeck Quarte

One track has been streamed three and a half million times, and another a mere two and a half million. They’ve recorded composers you’ve never heard of, and composers you’ll wonder how you lived without. They’ve even persuaded top virtuosi to record