I wish you all Happy Holidays… and see you next year!

So today I’d like to talk about memory and piano performance. A problem, which scares all of us, amateurs as professionals. Since Liszt, “the inventor” of modern recital, it has become compulsory to do without score on stage. Did Liszt had in mind that he was going to torment generations of pianists? I don’t hope so, but the result is here: we must play by heart.

Next week, I will give a recital in Prague. On the program, the famous Mozart’s sonata in C Major Kv 330. This sonata has been played many times, and by the biggest names… making it hard to tackle it, and even more difficult to assume in concert. Because yes, it’s actually the first time I’m going to perform Mozart in public!

It occurs to me that I haven’t dedicated a post to Brad Mehldau yet. Consider it done with this video from “resignation”, in which you can listen to the American Pianist playing in trio with Jorge Rossy and Larry Grenadier. Born in 1970 in Jacksonville, FL, Brad Mehldau recorded his first opus in 1995 for [...]

During the first episode of this little story of musical notation, we were mainly focused on Greeks. Following this tradition, the western medieval musical notation was first alphabetic. Octaves were labeled in uppercase and lowercase letters: The uppercase letter (A) indicated the first octave, the lowercase letter (a) the second one, the doubled lowercase letter [...]

Yesterday, 27th of november, was the birthday of the German composer Helmut Lachenmann, born in 1935. Luigi Nono’s disciple, he is considered as a major composer of our time and as the most representative of the “klangkomposition”.

The keyboard: we find it enjoyable or we hate it because too heavy, we blame it for all evil or we praise it because it has let us play well. Each mechanics is different and gives the pianist a different feeling when playing. I received several questions about this topic from a reader, which I will try to answer.

The municipality of Trois-Rivières in Québec has found a strange way to secure the local underground parking. The authorities have indeed installed headspeakers, playing around the clock classical music in the stairwells of this big parking lot.

It’s through meticulously selected works as well as his bewitching interpretation that the French pianist Pierre-Arnaud Dablemont invites us to a voyage rich in colors on Tuesday, December 16th 2008 from 6:30pm at Palffý Palác in Prague. Entrance is free.