A post for John Cage’s birthday (5 September 1912)
A piece in which the performer is directed to remain silent for 4 minutes and 33 seconds made American composer John Cage famous – and infamous. His 4’33” is as much a piece of conceptual art and a profound musing on the nature of silence as it is a piece of music: through it, Cage challenged traditional notions of what constitutes music, performance, a concert and above all, silence….
There’s a unique intimacy in the piano duet and a special etiquette must be observed when playing. For this reason, you need to be on friendly terms with your duet partner! The players sit very close together at the keyboard, often their hands will touch or cross over (Debussy’s Petite Suite contains much hand-crossing between the players), and each must be alert to the other’s part, sensitive to details of tempo, dynamics and musical expression, while details of pedalling and page-turns need to be agreed in advance. While some works for piano duet are undoubtedly aimed at children or junior players, many are highly complex, technically and musically challenging, such as Poulenc’s Sonata for Piano Four Hands and works by Rachmaninoff and Messiaen. Some of the greatest pianists of the 20th century have enjoyed the very special relationship of the piano duet, including Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim, Radu Lupu and Murray Perahia, and Cyril Smith and Phyllis Sellick, the great British piano duo from an earlier era.
(not available in the US and Canada)
The dance is as old as music itself, and many dances for keyboard or piano have their origin in folk dances such as the Mazurka, Polonaise, Polka, Tarantella and Tango. These folk dances and their characteristic rhythms and metres were taken by composers such as Fryderyk Chopin and elevated into refined salon pieces which are popular with audiences and pianists alike.
Playlist curated by Frances Wilson.
How do we define “virtuosity” in a musical performance? I believe that when one hears it, it is as if one’s level of consciousness had been raised, and that it is impossible to ever think of the piano in the same way again. Such experiences are highly personal, revelatory, memorable and almost impossible to describe.
A true virtuoso “must call up scent and blossom, and breathe the breath of life” – Franz Liszt
It is during a performance by a true virtuoso pianist that we, the audience, enter a state of wonder, from which we emerge speechless, hardly able to put into words what we have just heard because the experience of the performance has awakened in us what it means to be a sentient, thinking, feeling, living, breathing human being.
I hope this selection will demonstrate some of the very special qualities of each pianist chosen.
First published in 2007 ‘The Rest Is Noise’ by Alex Ross, music critic of the ‘New Yorker’, charts twentieth century Western classical music from the dying embers of “fin de siecle” Europe and the years prior to the devastation of the First World War to the present day. In many ways, the book is less a history of classical music than a history of the twentieth century as told through its remarkable, often shocking and epoch-making music.
Playlist curated by Frances Wilson.
(This playlist is not available in the US and Canada)
The piano study or ‘Étude’ has long engaged and challenged pianists, and the practice of writing Études to provide material for perfecting a particular pianistic technique, such as playing octaves or rapid scalic passages, developed in the early 19th century alongside the growing popularity of the piano.
Playlist curated by Frances Wilson.
The Cross-Eyed Pianist 