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A mixtape compilation from composer Charlotte Botterill

Despite starting secondary school in the year 2000, my friends and I did actually make mixtapes for each other! At the end of each year we were told to keep our foreign language listening exercise tapes, so instead of throwing them away (because, let’s face it, we barely listened to them to do our homework, we weren’t going to listen to them for fun!), we turned them into mixtapes. I’d sit in my room, covering the top of the tape with layers of Sellotape in order to be able to record over year 8 French, and hand selecting some of my favourite new music discoveries to share with my friends.

I spent a lot of my time obsessing over my new music discoveries, researching the artists, their influences, and buying as much of their back catalogue as my pocket money allowed. I remember a friend’s parent once saying to me “But you have the Greatest Hits, all the best songs are on there.” I was so surprised by this statement because some of the most interesting songs, and some of my favourite songs, are album tracks.

This playlist is a nod to those teenage mixtapes. It features 10 songs, none of which were released as singles (or B sides), which I absolutely love. These songs and their albums had a huge impact on the way I thought about music and opened up my mind to new, endless possibilities.

Best listened to in order, with headphones, in a dimly lit room with your favourite drink.

Take My Breath Away – Queen

I find Freddie Mercury’s use of the sustain pedal and the backing vocals really atmospheric and beautifully crafted. The swirling vocals at the end are especially ethereal.

Happiness Is A Warm Gun – The Beatles

This song was on one of the “original” school mixtapes given to me by a friend who loved The Beatles and who is responsible for getting me into them too (thanks Diane)! I was struck by the bizarre lyrics, and that each section of the song is in a different rock ‘n’ roll style, including blues and a 50s doo-wop spoof.

Freedom Rider – Traffic

I love Traffic’s music because they mix together rock, folk and jazz to make really cool songs. This was the first time I’d heard a flute in a rock song, and the first time I’d heard jazz flute. I love the vocal panning and energy at the end, as if we are indeed on a wild ride.

Moonage Daydream – David Bowie

This opening chord progression (I III vi V) is so lifting, it’s a real favourite of mine. Exquisite arranging; the reverb-ladened guitar outro sits beautifully against the phased strings.

1983…(A Merman I Should Turn To Be) – Jimi Hendrix

I’ve always found this song very chilled but immensely interesting. The extensive use of studio effects (delay, extreme panning, reversed guitar, manipulation of microphone feedback), the inclusion of a flexatone, and the improvisatory nature of the middle section creates a really otherworldly sound.

My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion – The Flaming Lips

80s pop left me hating the majority of synth sounds, but The Flaming Lips showed me how beautiful they can now be. This song is a great example of their lush MIDI and synth orchestration. I really love the imitation birds flying around at the start.

Boys In The Band – The Libertines

The Libertines embody the spirit of punk but with some interesting chord voicing (one of the guitarists cites Django Reinhardt as an influence). I really like the rawness of their sound. It captures the energy of their live gigs and is a good antidote to some of the highly polished albums I listen to!

Pretty Green (feat. Santigold) – Mark Ronson

This reworking of The Jam’s Pretty Green is so cool. Turning the lyrics into something more akin to a playground chant and backing it with 60s and 70s influenced brassy, percussion heavy soul. The bass slides are awesome and the whole vibe just makes me want to dance.

He Can Only Hold Her – Amy Winehouse

Back To Black was the first pop album released in my teens which I actually liked. Amy’s vocals are obviously perfect, but Mark Ronson’s arrangements and studio production are what made me fall in love with this album. It has the vintage Motown sound, but at the same time it’s current and fresh. Mark Ronson is a musical genius!

Dream Brother – Jeff Buckley

Featuring a vibraphone and tablas alongside your typical band set up, this song is beautifully hypnotic, provocative, and emotionally honest. You can really hear the Indian music influence and I love pieces which blend different musical traditions so effortlessly.

Charlotte Botterill is a composer from St Albans, England. Her musical output is varied, reflecting her own eclectic taste. She enjoys exploring timbre and harmony, and her music is influenced by personal experiences and social observations.

Her debut album Isolation was released in December 2020 on Lis de la Mer records. In 2019 Charlotte won the grade 7 category of the Trinity College London Young Composers Competition, which resulted in her piece Soho being published in the 2021-2023 piano syllabus at grade 7. As an arranger, her work has been played on BBC Three Counties radio and on BBC Radio York. During the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Charlotte’s music has been performed by concert pianists Francesca Hurst and Maria Marchant as part of their online concert series.

If you would like to submit a mixtape to The Cross-Eyed Pianist, please get in touch

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034571282602‘Vida Breve’ (Short Life) – Stephen Hough, piano (Hyperion CDA68260)

It seems fitting that Stephen Hough’s new album ‘Vida Breve’, featuring music on the theme of death, should be released while we are still in the thrall of the coronavirus. But this album is not a response to the pandemic and was in fact conceived and recorded long before any of us had heard of coronavirus or COVID-19.

Yet its theme is highly relevant to our Corona times when death dominates the news, from the daily tally of COVID deaths and grim predictions from scientific and medical experts. Despite this, as Stephen Hough says in the CD’s liner notes, we are still reluctant to talk about death, a reluctance which has increased over the past 50-odd years during which medical science has made it possible for people survive better and for longer and has led to a greater disassociation from and hyper-sensitivity to discussions about death.

For artists, writers and composers death has always been a central preoccupation, resulting in some of the most extraordinary, exultant and emotionally profound expression in painting, literature and music – amply demonstrated in the works on Hough’s new album. In the nineteenth century people were far closer to death than we are today, and for Chopin (whose short life was dogged by ill-health), Liszt and Busoni, composers whose music is included on this CD, death was understood and accepted as part of the natural course of life.

As a Catholic, I suspect Stephen Hough has a fairly robust attitude towards death, perhaps more closely aligned to that of the composers featured on his new disc (and remember Liszt was a devout Catholic). Hough’s faith teaches us not to fear death but to accept it as the only certainty in life, and his own piano sonata ‘Vida Breve’, the work which lends its title to the disc, explores the brevity of life, a reminder that our allocated time is short. An abstract, introspective work constructed of five tiny motivic cells, which interact contrapuntally and include a quotation from the French chanson En Avril à Paris, made famous by Charles Trenet, ‘Vida Breve’ lasts a mere 10 minutes, a comment on the transient, fleeting nature of life, its passions and turmoil.

Bach’s mighty Chaconne from the D minor violin Partita opens this recording, in Busoni’s glorious, romantic transcription for solo piano. This epic cathedral of sound is an awe-inspiring, emphatic opener (Hough played it at his Wigmore Hall livestream concert in June 2020), and here Hough gives it an authoritative, multi-layered, orchestral monumentalism. It’s opening is dark and sombre, yet the processional nature of this piece, with its sense of building, dying back, then increasing again, brings a remarkably uplifting atmosphere to this music, and of course its final cadence, a Picardy Third, ensures that it closes with a clear sense of positivity.

After the towering majesty of the Chaconne, Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 is fleet and turbulent, its anxious intensity tempered when Hough lingers over the more lyrical Nocturne-like passages in the opening movement and the Scherzo, or when he allows the essential nobility of the music to shine through over disruptive bass motifs. Like the Chaconne, the famous Marche funèbre is magisterial rather than simply funereal, while the tender, dreamy middle section lends an other-worldliness to the music’s atmosphere before the tolling bass and mournful theme return.

In addition to the thematic associations between the pieces, there are musical connections too: the dark rumbling bass octaves in the Bach/Busoni Chaconne are reiterated in the Marche funèbre – a plangent left hand accompaniment which, in the reprise of the famous theme dominates, with a dark tolling grandeur. And this figure is later heard again in the opening of Liszt’s Funerailles, to which Hough brings an ominous darkness, its slow-march meter suggesting the dead weight of a bier on the shoulders who carry it, before a more reflective, wistful section. The other piece by Liszt, the Bagatelle Sans Tonalité, is a musical gargoyle with its wayward harmonic language and grimacing, dancing rhythms.

The remaining works on the disc are encores of a sort – a reminder that this final recital is not quite over….. Busoni’s Kammer-Fantasie über Carmen uses familiar melodies and motifs from Bizet’s opera and transforms them into a witty concert piece, to which Hough brings a warm romanticism. His own transcription of Arirang, a traditional Korean folksong, is gentle and contemplative, its lyrical melody singing out over a flowing accompaniment. It leads naturally into Gounod’s recasting of Bach’s Prelude in C into Ave Maria (also transcribed by Hough), a popular work at funerals, perhaps because it is both perfect music for the transit to the afterlife and for reflections on life and the inevitability of its end. Death, now where is thy sting?

This album is masterly is its programming; stimulating and provocative, it’s a superb recital disc and, being Hough, the music is thoughtfully chosen and impeccably played.

Highly recommended

FW

‘Vida Breve’ is released by Hyperion on 29 January 2021. 

This review first appeared on The Cross-Eyed Pianist site

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Pianists, aged between 20 and 29 and representing 28 countries, have been carefully selected to compete in the first ever Virtual International First Round, taking place in London, Berlin, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul, New York, 6-10 April 2021

 

Second Round, Semi-Finals & Finals of the 2021 Leeds International Piano Competition to be held in Leeds, 8-18 September 2021

 

The Leeds International Piano Competition today announced that 63 pianists have been shortlisted for the First Round of the 20th edition of the competition. 

The pre-selection Jury, chaired by Artistic Director Adam Gatehouse, listened to 264 applicants – a 43% increase in applications from the last Competition in 2018. Jurors commented on the challenges of choosing the 63 due to the “exceptionally high quality of applicants.” The 63 pianists represent 28 nationalities, with 44% selected from East Asian countries. Four British nationals have been selected as well as competitors from Morocco, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Iran, Israel and Peru.

The First Round Jury, chaired by Adam Gatehouse and including Simone Dinnerstein (USA), Noriko Ogawa (Japan) and Martin Sauer (Germany), will hear a 25-minute recital from each of the 63 pianists before selecting 24 to go through to the Second Round in Leeds in September 2021.

‘The Leeds’, with its defining qualities of excellence and musical integrity, has long attracted some of the world’s most exciting young pianists. 

Detailed safety measures are in place at all venues with a local film crew deployed in each venue, centrally directed and produced from London, to capture the performances in high-definition sound and vision that The Leeds is known for via its partnership with medici.tv. 

All the performances from the International First Round will be made public in the summer, and the Leeds rounds will be streamed by medici.tvon their dedicated platform, which is free to watch in 190 countries around the world.

Adam Gatehouse, Artistic Director of The Leeds said: 
“It is of paramount importance that our artists and jurors are able to take part as safely as possible, whilst maintaining the integrity of the Competition experience. This means we have decided to make the First Round ‘virtual’, by filming Competitors’ performances in a small selection of venues closest to them. With the amazing support and enthusiasm of conservatoires and venues around the world, we can ensure the pianists have the shortest possible journey to their First Round performance. Our partners also enable us to make sure that all our pianos are of the world-leading standard we demand and that we can capture the highest quality performances for our remote Jury to hear.” 

With the speedy rollout of vaccines in the UK, The Leeds organisers are very confident that the September rounds will be a live celebration in their spectacular venues at the University of Leeds and Leeds Town Hall. All rounds will be streamed worldwide by medici.tv and BBC Radio 3 and BBC Four TV will cover the Finals. The Concerto Final performances, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, will be conducted by Andrew Manze, their Principal Guest Conductor.

The stakes are higher than ever with cash prizes worth over £90,000 and a prize package which has redefined what a competition can offer young artists. It includes artistic management with Askonas Holt, one of the world’s most renowned music management agencies; concerts and engagements with some of the world’s premiere venues and orchestras, including London’s Wigmore Hall, South Bank Centre and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra; concert and recording engagements with BBC Radio 3, a media partner of The Leeds; a European tour organised with partners Steinway & Sons; a studio recording with Warner Classics; a programme of recital engagements in Yorkshire and other UK venues; and mentoring from Artistic Director Adam Gatehouse and other members of the performer-led Jury, chaired by Imogen Cooper (England), which includes Adam Gatehouse (England), Inon Barnatan (Israel/ USA), Adrian Brendel (England), Gaetan Le Divelec (France), Ingrid Fliter (Argentina), Ludovic Morlot (France/ USA) and Steven Osborne (Scotland).

Adam Gatehouse said:
“It is clear from the large increase in the number of applicants we’ve received that musicians have a strong need to be heard and connect with their audiences. We are here to support all our pianists on their Leeds journey, and will provide a programme of advice, masterclasses and industry insights to help build their careers, no matter how far the journey with the Competition takes them. We aim for everyone to be transformed by the experience of coming to our city and taking part, whether that’s through the friendships they make or the opportunities they find.”

 

A full list of Competitors can be viewed here.

Source: press release

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It can come as quite a shock to encounter a professional musician outside of their natural home of the concert hall. Generally, our only contact with them, as audience members, may be a brief conversation in the green room after a concert or at a post-concert CD signing. When on stage, musicians seem to exist in a strange ‘other’ world separate from ours; this ‘mystique’ is created partly by the musicians themselves who require a certain distance in order to work.

The virtuoso at home can be disappointingly ordinary, as I discovered when, some years before I started writing regularly about classical music, I interviewed a British concert pianist at his home in the leafy suburbs. I had expected something more refined, more esoteric. His piano room was not some Lisztian salon, as I had naively imagined it might be, all crimson swags and a bust of the composer for inspiration, or an ascetic monkish cell, but a tidy “office” equipped with the tools of his trade – a grand piano and a career’s worth of scores neatly lining one wall. What came as more of a shock was that he talked about the fine art of creating beautiful music for others to enjoy as if it were any other nine-to-five job. I later realised that this was his way of balancing his practice time and a busy diary of concerts with his obligations to his family, and the need for “down time”.

In fact, most musicians are normal people: they live in ordinary homes, have families, pets, cars to service, a mortgage or rent to pay. This “ordinariness” has been more than confirmed by the many videos musicians have released online of them playing in their own homes during the lockdowns imposed around the world in response to coronavirus. We got a glimpse into their living rooms and studios and discovered they are, generally, just like us! They “normalise” the incredibly artistic and highly intellectual thing that they do on stage in order to function day to day and get their work (practising) done. Because for them, music is their job.

But of course what marks them out is their ability to transform the normal into the beautiful, the pedestrian into the transcendent, and the everyday into the extraordinary.

Musicians are extraordinary. Their meticulous approach to physical and psychological conditioning is akin to that of an elite athlete and the parallels between sport and music are very close – from day-to-day training to peak performance. Musicians, like elite sportspeople, require discipline, dedication and commitment to do what they do and do it well, and many make huge sacrifices to achieve this.

In addition to finely-tuned motor function, musicians also possess superior cognitive skills as evidenced by their ability to process, finesse and memorise vast amounts of data in the form of notes and directions on the score, an activity in which they engage on a daily basis during the practice and study of the music.

Their working hours are long, arduous and often unsociable – the late nights, the travelling, the Sisyphean accumulation of airmiles, nights spent in faceless continental hotels in beautiful, historic cities they won’t ever have time to explore because of rehearsal commitments…. In addition, the profession is very precarious – and this has been amply and very sadly confirmed by the pandemic. It’s a lifestyle not many of us would choose.

And yet in spite of all of this, musicians have chosen this life. In interviews, many talk about how “the music chose them”, rather than the other way round, and speak of the incredible power music, and the desire to share it with others in performance, exerts over them. This need, this will to play is what drives them, and as audience members we can only marvel at this extraordinary cultural gift which musicians are prepared to give to us.

Image: Photo by Ivanna Blinova on Unsplash

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