Music Reviews

Traditional classical music finally wore out its welcome with me a few years ago by endless repetition of the Top Twenty pieces on FM radio.

Renowned Japanese percussionist Kuniko Kato makes stunning music from the simplest of instruments, stretching their sonorities to heights never previously heard on record.

The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition ended with the results many observers had predicted, the gold medal going to a self-assured Vadym Kholodenko, 26, of Ukraine.

I recently became a “chance music” composer by accident – the best way. John Cage would have approved.

The late American composer Morton Feldman, an influential underground figure who was spurned by mainstream musicians in his lifetime, is enjoying a welcome, if belated, renaissance in the US and Europe.

Except for the lucky few who have the gift, students struggling to coax music out of a piano are in for a world of pain.

A young man from provincial Italy brought style back to the recent Van Cliburn Piano Competition with unbridled displays of joy at the keyboard and a mature artist’s mastery of the music.

Alessandro Deljavan, the promising young Italian pianist who emerged as a major contender at the recent Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, has decided to pull out of the Cleveland International Piano Competition just a month before it opens July 3O.

Young pianists who decide to go into major international competitions will need much more than musicianship from now on.

The young Italian pianist Mauro Bertoli, now based in Ottawa, Canada, displays considerable hubris in leading off his recent solo CD with three well-known Scarlatti sonatas. If he felt he had something to say that Horowitz and Pogorelich hadn’t already said, he was right.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is one of the most arresting of the Romantic period creations but this has not prevented commentators from writing “roaring cataracts of nonsense” about it.  Those choice words from the late English critic and musicologist Donald Tovey came to mind as