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Two weeks before the death of eminent pianist and conductor Seymour Lipkin, Patricia Stowell had the opportunity to interview him for Clavier Companion magazine. Lipkin first gained public attention in 1948 after winning first prize at the Rachmaninoff Fund Piano Contest in New York. The Detroit native had studied with Rudolph Serkin and Mieczyslaw...
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The great pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow once called Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas the New Testament of music. This bold declaration foreshadowed the lofty status Beethoven's Testament now holds in the Western canon of classical music. It also set the stage for an impressive lineage of recordings, beginning with the first-ever complete cycle by Artur Schnabel—the celebrated Austrian pianist known to Harold C. Schonberg as "the man who invented Beethoven." Among those who followed in Schnabel's footsteps are some of the greatest pianists of the 20th and 21st centuries—Claudio Arrau, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Wilhelm Backhaus, Daniel Barenboim, Alfred Brendel, Annie Fischer, and the list goes on—and so it comes as no surprise that many pianists today treat this massive undertaking as a right of passage.
In one sense, however, it's also dangerous to enter the company of such esteemed colleagues. How does one "compete"? What new can be "said" of music that has been a staple of the repertoire for so long? These are some of the questions facing Steinway Artist James Brawn as he continues his Odyssey—now half finished—to record von Bülow's New Testament.
Your project invokes a monumental legacy of inspired Beethoven interpreters. Do you feel the weight of history on your shoulders?
While it is true there is a great historical legacy of recordings, the only pressure I feel personally is to do these piano sonatas justice and play them as faithfully as I am able. The works of the great composers, like Beethoven, are such a privilege to study and perform, and I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to record this cycle for MSR Classics.
As an artist, do you draw on the work of those who came before you? Or are you a lone wanderer?
Perhaps I'm more of a lone wanderer, in the sense I've always done my own thing and in my own time. Certainly when I was a student—until my early twenties—I was influenced by my teachers, as well as recordings and performances by great living pianists. So at that time, there was always someone looking over my shoulder, so to speak. But for the last twenty years I've managed to focus on music that I can't live without. The Beethoven sonatas have become extremely important to my being, and communicating this personal passion in recital, recording, and teaching is the inevitable outcome.
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Valentina Lisitsa is a formidable pianist with dazzling technique and an ever-growing fan base. A self-made luminary, she was arguably the first classical musician to catapult herself from relative obscurity to superstardom using social media alone. At forty-three, the Ukrainian-American virtuoso now boasts 300,000 subscribers to her YouTube channe...
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Attendees of the 2015 National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy will have the exciting opportunity to hear guest artist Sean Chen—a brilliant pianist who was the first American in sixteen years to win an award (the third-place Crystal) at the 2013 Van Cliburn competition. Among his many other accomplishments and honors, Sean was also awarded the 201...
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Ingrid Jacobson Clarfield has given lecture recitals, workshops, and master classes in more than a hundred cities across America, including many at state and national conferences of the Music Teachers National Association. She has presented master classes and pedagogy sessions at the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy, the TCU/Van Clibur...
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Stephen Hough has been called a Renaissance Man. In 2009 he was named one of the top twenty living polymaths by The Economist and Intelligent Life magazines. In addition to a full international concert schedule, the award-winning pianist and recording artist—who in 2014 was made a Commander of the British Empire—has been prolifically blogging on Th...
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