After almost a lifetime of music-making and trying to figure out what it is saying, I’m coming closer to the thought that the message of music is the music itself. For an experiment in discovery, I’ve been listening to all

The winner of the 1966 Leeds International Piano Competition, Spanish pianist Rafael Orozco (1946-1996) was born into a musical family and enrolled at the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Córdoba at the age of 7. He later studied at the

A natural process for the creative artist is to reproduce what he admires. In the case of composers, it translates as composing the music that they heard and enjoyed, or the music that they want to hear. Of course, the

It’s hard to believe Alfred Brendel turned 90 at the start of 2021. He’s been a part of my musical landscape since I was a teenager, when my mother, who was a great fan of Brendel and admired him in

Practicing has never been more challenging than right now while for the foreseeable future scheduling live concerts is in doubt. Amateurs, students, professionals—we’re all in the same boat. Without a performance on the horizon I too am unmotivated to practice.

The piano sonata genre boasts some of the finest music written for the instrument, from the wit and inventiveness of Haydn or the rhetoric and forward vision of Beethoven to the passionate romanticism of Chopin and Liszt, and the modernism

Nestled somewhere in Ravel’s output there resides a curious set of piano pieces, entitled Le Tombeau de Couperin – literally, Couperin’s Tomb. The set of six piano pieces were composed between 1914 and 1917; four of the six then went

“Playing lifts you out of yourself into a delirious place.”– Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987) Arguably one of the best cellists in the 20th century, the brief career and short life of Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987) are a tragic story: A