Harpsichord wizard delivers all that is expected, and plenty more.

Works will range from opera, electronics, and immersive live performance, with two thirds of funding going to women composers.

This new 2-disc set brings a selection of Glass’s music for solo piano.

English pianist Jonathan Plowright continues to stake his claim for recording the modern benchmark set of Brahms piano works with this fourth volume in BIS’s superlative series. This despite stiff competition from Irishman Barry Douglas, who has already completed his six-volume set for Chandos and the redoubtable Paul Lewis who coupled the Four Ballades with his recent five-star reading of the First Piano Concerto. The difference in approach between Plowright and Douglas is no better demonstrated than in the third Intermezzo from the Piano Pieces Op. 119. It’s marked grazioso e giocoso and Plowright dispatches it with infectious high spirits in 1’15’’ while Douglas chooses more grace than jocularity with a generous 1’51’’. Plowright bookends this latest programme with the first and second sets of the 30 Paganini Variations. Played straight through they are tedious for listener and performer alike, but Plowright’s solution is a fine one. He plays the other works – the Ballades, Rhapsodies and Piano Pieces Op. 119 – in their original groupings whereas the adventurous Douglas seasons a set of Cappricios with a single Ballade or Intermezzo. So, very different approaches from two very different performers. Ultimately the choice will be yours. If you can… Continue…

Barenboim’s new piano is a concert grand made by the Belgian instrument maker Chris Maene to the pianist’s specifications. It differs from the usual Steinway D in several crucial respects, one being the use of parallel rather than crossover strings. So far this Maene piano is the only one of its kind, and Barenboim has “fallen in love with it”. I hear less tonal homogeneity across the registers, less “blend” as the pianist puts it. The bass produces great warmth, shown off in Liszt’s arrangement of the March from Wagner’s Parsifal. The tone of the upper registers resembles a Classical period fortepiano (“hollow” is too strong a word), which makes it eminently suitable for Scarlatti. I’ve not heard Barenboim in Scarlatti before; he approaches these three sonatas in an unruffled but characterful way. Like the Fazioli piano, which it also resembles in the treble, the Maene seems incapable of producing a smooth, singing legato – rather a drawback in Chopin’s Ballade No 1 and Liszt’s Funérailles – and we are used to more upper-level brightness in Beethoven’s 32 Variations and Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz. The latter is neither diabolic nor exciting, although the tone colours are attractive. Big… Continue reading Get…

Although the man tried to explain why he was practising while driving, the police remained unconvinced.

A school girl in the US, with no left hand, is giving the violin a red hot go after students built her a hot pink prosthetic arm.

After a hand injury in 2005, Kyung Wha Chung stepped away from the concert platform and turned to teaching. More than a decade later, this is her triumphant return to recording. Although Chung had recorded Partita No 2 and Sonata No 3 back in 1975, this disc is the complete Bach Sonatas and Partitas. They’re the solo violin Everest, since the player is completely exposed, without the reassuring safety net of an accompanist. At the same time, Bach demands the player navigate a thicket of interlocking lines of music. Tricky! This is quite a different recording to most recent performances of these pieces. By now, there’s a fairly firmly ingrained tendency towards historically informed performances of Bach’s music, but here Chung neatly sidesteps the issue. It’s not that she ignores the HIP movement (on the contrary – tempos are fleet here, and vibrato is kept on the subtle side), but more that minor quibbles about stylistic approaches are exchanged for an intensely passionate performance. Chung describes this disc as a project that has been with her for 60 years, calling it “recording Unaccompanied Bach”, and it seems like those capital letters are important. This is… Continue reading Get unlimited digital…

If you’ve worn out your copy of Georges Cziffra playing Liszt’s Transcendental Studies – and why wouldn’t you, because he da man – and are in the market for a newer model, should you direct your hard-earned cash towards Daniil Trifonov on Deutsche Grammophon or Kirill Gerstein on Myrios? Both are newly released and attracting praise like superlatives are about to outlawed by presidential executive order. Like everything Trifonov touches, his Transcendental Studies are proudly personal statements and wilfully so on occasion – witness, for example, the roof-rocking intensity of the fourth study, Mazeppa, where the volatile harmony is allowed to churn up the structure, and the ‘recitativo’ section of the coda plays out as something approaching a mad-scene. Gerstein – who plays the definitive 1852 version of Liszt’s Twelve Etudes – sits more obviously in a tradition that stretches back to Cziffra. Much has been written about how Gerstein’s background in jazz lends his performance an improvisational, power-to-the-moment flow. But despite his studies on the jazz course at Berklee and mentoring by jazz vibraphone guru Gary Burton, I’m not sure I hear it like that. At every turn, Gerstein peels the minutiae’s minutiae out from Liszt’s notation. The spread…

Claire Huang took to the stage in New York after being placed second in an international piano and strings competition.

From busker to band leader, meet the young gun turned experienced hand.

The dynamic duo have taken to the streets for a busking marathon to send them round the world.