YCAT, the Young Classical Artists Trust, which identifies, supports and nurtures early in their professional careers, has put together some very useful resources in its 21cMusician toolkit – a brand new series of micro-courses, videos, interviews, blogs and live events, each with a different monthly focus, to help young musicians kickstart their careers.
In the crowded, highly competitive market that is the classical music industry, it can be hard for young musicians to get started and make a mark – and never more so now, at a time when the industry and the arts in general, are in extremely straitened circumstances due to the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic – young musicians need good advice and practical support, which YCAT seeks to offer with its resources.
In the first of its monthly series, #21cMusician toolkit, the power of programming is explored with a number of leading music writers, critics and reviewers, myself included – plus advice on designing inventive and intriguing programmes.
Piano music commissioned and recorded during lockdown to support musicians struggling during the Covid-19 crisis
There have been many initiatives to keep the music playing and support musicians during these difficult times. What all of these initiatives demonstrate is that musicians are, despite straitened circumstances, determined to keep playing and to continue to share their music with audiences. It also sends a powerful message to government that the industry is determined to survive, to let the music play, come what may.
I have a personal interest in this wonderful project by pianist Duncan Honeybourne: Duncan and I are friends, and also colleagues – together we run a lunchtime concert series in Weymouth.
During the UK lockdown, Duncan decided to offer short video recitals from his home every day. He called them ‘Piano Soundbites’. The series proved very popular and within a few weeks, Duncan had the idea to approach composers to ask them to write new piano pieces for him, to be premiered as ‘Contemporary Piano Soundbites’ in his video recitals. Alongside this, Duncan set up a Just Giving page to raise funds for Help Musicians UK (formerly the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund). The response was incredible – the project, which was ranked in the top 10% of Just Giving fundraisers nationally during April 2020, has already raised well over £2000 for Help Musicians UK, supporting musician colleagues struggling in the current situation.
‘Contemporary Piano Soundbites’ celebrates the diversity of styles embraced by a broad cross-section of professional composers working today. Featured composers include Sadie Harrison, Graham Fitkin, John McLeod, David Lancaster, Francis Pott, Luke Whitlock and John Casken, as well as younger and emerging composers, and each piece is no more than 6 minutes long at the most. These piano miniatures represent an important contribution to the ever-expanding repertoire for the instrument, to be enjoyed by amateur, professional and student pianists alike.
pianist Duncan Honeybourne
“….it was an invigorating experience to record an entire disc of pieces which hadn’t existed less than four months earlier! Especially stimulating and exciting is the juxtaposition of several leading senior composers with some of their most gifted younger colleagues. Several young composers make their first appearances on disc.
My objective, as I stated in my invitation to composers, was fourfold: to imaginatively harness the zeitgeist of our present situation: to bring comfort and enjoyment to a large ready-made audience stuck at home, to aid musicians badly affected by the “cultural lockdown” and to add to the contemporary repertoire, creating an artistic keepsake of this extraordinary phase in our history.
My long term plan is that, as well as helping our colleagues at a time of need, the collection will provide a snapshot of reflections and musings by some of the finest and most distinctive composers of our time at a unique and unprecedented moment in our history. I hope the disc will make for a refreshing, enriching, stimulating and quirky listening experience too!” Duncan Honeybourne, September 2020
The music was recorded in late July 2020 in the new Gransden Hall at Sherborne Girls School, Dorset.
The disc is released on the Prima Facie label and is available to order now
For review copies, sample tracks, interviews with Duncan and other press information please contact Frances Wilson
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Leopold Godowksy (1870-1938) is regarded as one of the giants of the keyboard, renowned for his formidable technique and ingenious transcriptions of works by other composers, transforming already challenging pieces, such as Chopin’s Études, into works of extraordinary difficulty and invention, which few pianists are prepared to tackle. In addition to transcriptions, Godowsky was also a significant and prolific composer in his own right. He was the last in a lineage of great post-romantic composers that included Rachmaninoff and Busoni, and made a major contribution to the development of piano music. A ‘pianist for pianists’, the critic James Huneker referred to him as the “Buddha of the Piano”; popular during his lifetime, Godowsky and his music is hardly known or performed today.
The Cuban-American pianist Antonio Iturrioz is one of the few musicians to rise to the challenge of Godowsky’s music and, following an injury to his right hand when he was a young man, he spent several years studying Godowsky’s complete left hand transcriptions and original compositions. His 2010 film The Buddha of the Piano – Leopold Godowsky is the result of meticulous research into the composer’s life and music, and is the first and only film on Leopold Godowsky. Illustrated with archive material including photographs, scores and piano rolls, this engaging film summarizes Godowsky’s achievements as a pianist and composer, and reveals his busy, peripatetic life, and his thoughts on music and life, shining an important light on, arguably, the greatest pianist of all time. But perhaps what is most satisfying is the music which accompanies the film. Performed by Antonio Iturrioz himself, he demonstrates not only superlative technical fluency, endlessly rising to the vertiginous challenges of this phenomenal music, but also shows a deep appreciation of Godowsky’s unique artistry. Mr Iturrioz’s film, together with his performances, are a wonderful endorsement of Leopold Godowsky’s remarkable talent and his significant contribution to pianism and piano repertoire.
Antonio Iturrioz playing the restored 1923 Steinway Duo-Art Concert Grand which was used for the performances for his film
More information about Antonio Iturrioz’s film here
Concert pianist, documentarian and Steinway Artist Antonio Iturrioz, born in Cuba, came to the United States when he was 7 years old. Giving his first concert at 9, he played the Liszt First Piano Concerto for his orchestral debut at 15. His teachers have included his father, Pablo Iturrioz; Francisco De Hoyos, a pupil of Gyorgi Sandor; Bernardo Segall, who studied with the Liszt pupil Alexander Siloti; Aube Tzerko; and Julian White. He has taken master classes from Byron Janis, Alexis Weissenberg, Jorge Bolet, and Andre Watts.
While recuperating from an injury to his right hand, Iturrioz learned important and obscure works for the left hand, including the complete Godowsky arrangements and original compositions. This led to his first film, the unique documentary The Art of the Left Hand: A Brief History of Left Hand Piano Music, called “an important film” by Clavier magazine. His second, The Buddha of the Piano: Leopold Godowsky, the only film about Godowsky, has been shown at international piano festivals, colleges in the U.S., the Edinburgh Society of Musicians and at the American Liszt Festival in South Carolina. Highly praised by Marc-Andre Hamelin, Carlo Grante, and many others, Scotland’s greatest pianist of the second half of the Twentieth Century, Dr. Ronald Stevenson, said, “It is an important film for all pianists and pianophiles….You reveal with skill, clarity and sensitivity the intricacies of his polyphonic piano writing.” The film, translated into Italian and French, will soon be translated into Polish. Both films have been featured on national public television.
Iturrioz in 2013 gave the world premiere performance on one piano of L. M. Gottschalk’s complete two-movement symphony, La Nuit des Tropiques, (the first American symphony) having transcribed for the first time the second movement, “Fiesta Criolla,” for one piano.
The Steinway & Sons label released in fall 2018 the world premiere CD of this historic work. Andre Watts has called Gottschalk and Cuba an “extraordinary album of music!”
St Mary’s Perivale Beethoven Piano Sonata Festival
All 32 piano sonatas played by 32 pianists to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 1770 October 3rd and 4th 2020
St Mary’s Perivale is one of those wonderful little gems that once discovered you will want to return to again and again. For over 10 years now, this beautiful little 12th-century deconsecrated church has been home to a busy and varied programme of concerts, organised by the indetafigable Hugh Mather, a retired doctor with a passion for classical music. St Mary’s supports many young musicians at the start of their professional careers as well as presenting more established artists.
To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Beethoven, St Mary’s will showcase 32 pianists, who will each play one of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas – an incredible body of work considered to be the ‘New Testament’ of piano music. The sonatas will be performed in chronological order by a tag team of pianists, which includes Florian Mitrea, Callum McLachlan (son of Murray McLachlan), Ashley Fripp, Mishka Rushdie Momen, Julian Jacobson, Sasha Grynyuk, Dinara Klinton, Mark Viner and Julian Trevelyan. Many of these pianists live in and around London, which makes getting to the venue easier for them (sadly many musicians have been hit by travel restrictions due to the pandemic).
By having 32 different pianists playing the sonatas audiences can not only enjoy the variety and breadth of Beethoven’s musical imagination but also each pianist’s individual “take” – their approaches, interpretative choices and personality – on the music. Each will have something special to offer and all will perform to a very high standard.
This is not a festival which has been put together in a hurry in response to the limitations placed on public performances by government policy towards the pandemic: Hugh Mather has been planning it for months, inviting and priming the pianists involved to ensure they are fully prepared.
It promises to be a really wonderful weekend of music making.
This major Beethoven festival takes places over the weekend of 3rd and 4th October and will be streamed live from St Mary’s Perivale. For full details please visit the St Mary’s Perivale website
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