Kemble pianos on the lookout for best amateur pianist A Chopin competition for amateur pianists has been launched on YouTube. Kemble Pianos launched the online contest at the start of April, inviting budding pianists to submit videos of themselves playing their favourite Chopin piece. Similar to last year’s YouTube Symphony Orchestra, which saw musicians from around the world submit audition […]

“Because of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano a man sat waiting Monday afternoon in the Newark airport instead of on a plane to Berlin. Thank you unpronounceable volcano. Sitting there, the man got a phone call. Yuja Wang had a sore arm, it seemed, and a doctor had ordered her to rest. The man didn’t wonder why they were telling him this. […]

Cristina Ortiz plays music by Mendelssohn, Brahms, Albéniz and Debussy in this live recording of a recital she gave during the Munich Klaviersommer. This video is freely provided by classicaltv.com: Your browser does not support iframes. Recital Program: Mendelssohn: Variations Serieuses, Op. 54 Brahms: Intermezzi Op. 118, No. 1 & 2 Albéniz: El Albaicín Cyril Scott: Lotusland Debussy: Deux Arabesques […]

Chopin’s four ballades are widely regarded as being among the most significant extended works for solo piano of the nineteenth century. In an illuminating discussion, Jim Samson combines history and analysis to provide a comprehensive picture of these popular piano works, investigating the social and musical background to Chopin’s music, evaluating the many printed editions of the ballades before considering […]

Passively listening to Mozart — or indeed any other music you enjoy — does not make you smarter. But more studies should be done to find out whether music lessons could raise your child’s IQ in the long term, concludes a report analysing all the scientific literature on music and intelligence, which was published last week by the German research […]

Volkswagen in Stockholm, Sweden, have created a site called thefuntheory.com. The site features several videos all dedicated to the idea that happiness is the easiest way to get people to change. The three videos that are up there so far show how to make people not fail when putting litter in a bin, how to get more people to take […]

After initial selection based DVD recordings of the compulsory repertoire, the jury chose 215 contestants to take part in further auditions in Warsaw. The group features 24 Poles, 23 Chinese representatives, one person from Hong Kong, five pianists representing Taipei, 22 from Russia and 20 from the USA. The most numerous group – 40 pianists – comes from Japan. The […]

Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997) is widely recognized as one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. In this translation of the first full-scale biography of Richter, Danish composer Karl Aage Rasmussen combines his artistic appreciation of Richter’s career with a sympathetic telling of the pianist’s life based on family archives and interviews with people who worked and lived with him. […]

Alfred Brendel is an outstanding modern exponent of Schubert’s piano music. He is capable of bringing not only the verve of this music but also its poetic intensity and intellectual depth to life with a special vibrancy. In this unique collection – a 5 DVD box (on Naxos) at a very attractive price – he plays all of Schubert’s major […]

“This is an oustanding achievement, which any genuine Chopin lover and student of Romantic music should own … A landmark in the recording of Chopin’s music … Garrick Ohlsson and Hyperion deserve the greatest success in bringing this important undertaking to such a consistently impressive conclusion” (International Record Review) Garrick Ohlsson was the first American to win first prize in […]

Celebrate one of the greatest piano composers in history, Frédéric Chopin, with us today by listening to the Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman’s performance of Ballade no 2 in F-major while following along in Chopin’s autograph manuscript (available for free from pianostreet.com throughout the year 2010). Or if you are up for an even more exciting birthday experience, print out the […]

Reporting from Warsaw — The stirring strains of Frederic Chopin‘s music are reverberating across the world as music lovers celebrate the composer’s 200th birthday this year — from the château of his French lover to Egypt’s pyramids and even into space. But nowhere do celebrations carry the powerful sense of national feeling as they do in Poland, the land of […]