Michael Fabiano does a Master Class at the Royal College

Yesterday afternoon GodDaughter2 arranged for me to be in the audience (which was mostly singing students like her) of a master class presided over by American operatic tenor Michael Fabiano, a totally new name to me. He should not have been. My bad, as he would say. Very impressive. Very impressive.

This event was the most recent one of these. But they scrub all mention from there of the past, however immediate, so no mention there of Fabiano, which there had been until yesterday.

Here are a few recollections I banged into my computer last night before going to bed. Not tidied up much. I just didn’t want to forget it.

Sing, every note, all the time – switch off singing and then when you need to switch on again, you won’t be able to do it.

Singing is not just done with two little things in your throat. Sing with your whole body, from head to toe. Including your balls. (The student singers he was teaching were all guys, two baritones, two tenors.) I hope you don’t mind me saying such things. (Nobody did.)

You must sing to the people way up in the roof. They must hear every note you sing. Not just the people in the first five rows.

Don’t be afraid to take a breath – I’m a great fan of breathing when you need to breath – no seriously

First note is critical. Final note is critical. You can screw up in between. But first note bad can mean they’ll hear nothing further. Final note good, and that’s what they’ll remember.

Stay firmly planted on the floor. Stand how you stand in the tube, when you have nothing to hold on to. Don’t rise off the floor on your toes when it gets difficult.

Stay relaxed by going to your “happy place” in your mind.

In auditions, don’t be bound by rules that box you in. Break those rules, do whatever you have to do to do what you do. Applies to all artists.

Piano accompanists: play louder, like an orchestra. Louder. Twice as loud as that. (He spent a lot of time conducting the pianists.)

Go for it. (Said that a lot.) Be free. Fly like a bird. Never relax your wings (keep singing) or you fall to the ground.

In my opinion … this is my opinion …

Make progress as a young singer by finding one or two people whose judgement you trust. Follow their advice and work hour after hour, day after day, with them. A hundred people advising is confusion. One or two is what a young person needs.

How to make the transition from student to real singer? With difficulty. I began by doing 22 auditions all over Europe. First 21, I followed the rules, stood in the spot marked X: nothing, failure. 22nd audition: disaster. Fell over at the start, literally. But laughed at myself. Good middle notes, they knew I had a cold, but also a good personality. Got work. They trusted me to do better.

Mentor? Renee Fleming was one. Sang next to her on stage. Her voice ridiculously small, on stage. But, my agent way up at the back heard everything, and wept. I then sat way up there myself and listened to Fleming sing equally quietly, heard everything and was equally moved

Sing oh well and sing ee well, and you’ll sing ah well. (Think that was it.) …

And probably lots more that I missed. But, I now find, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube. However, the length-to-content ratio of watching something like this on YouTube is such that you, if you have got this far in this posting, are much more likely to make do with reading what I just put. So let’s hope I didn’t get anything too wrong. Plus: more mentions of this event, with video bits, at the RCM Twitter feed. Fabiano also tweets, of course. More reaction to yesterday there.

There were four student singers on show, first two being baritones, and in the second half, two tenors. The most extraordinary moments of this event came in the second half, when the two tenors took it in turns to sing things that Fabiano has presumably sung for real, as it were. And occasionally, to illustrate a point he was making, Fabiano would sing a snatch of the thing himself.

At which point, as the young people say these day: OMG. His sound was about four times bigger than what the students were doing. (The first of these moments got Fabiano a loud round of applause.) Fabiano’s talk, about filling the entire 2,500 people place, was a hell of a lot more than talk. He does this, every time he sings in such a place. The message was loud and the message was clear. That’s what you guys must aim for. That’s what it sounds like.

The good news is that the first tenor in particular (Thomas Erlank), was taking audible steps towards being an opera star, after only a few minutes of badgering from Fabiano. I think you’re great, said Fabiano, which is why I’m being so hard on you. Fabiano didn’t say those exact words to any of the others, so that will definitely have counted for something, in Erlank’s mind. You could see him getting bigger, as Fabiano both talked him up and hacked away at his mistakes.

Of the others, the one who particularly impressed me was the second baritone (Kieran Rayner), who looked and behaved like a trainee accountant, but who sang like a trainee god. By the time Fabiano had been at him for a bit, he started to get a bit more like an actual god. The sheer sound of Rayner’s voice was beautiful from the start, I thought. As did Fabiano.

Fabiano made a big deal of vibrato, which he seemed almost to equate with singing. But vibrato is, for me, a huge barrier. Rayner did do enough of it to satisfy Fabiano, but not nearly enough to put me off. I mention this because I believe that I am not the only one who feels this way. Too much wobble, and it just sounds like wobble and nothing else. Singers who overdo the wobble never break past that oh-god-it’s-bloody-opera barrier. But not enough vibrato, and they don’t get to fill those 2,500 seat opera houses. And even if they do, no OMG, Fabiano style.

Final point, by way of summary. When each singer did his performance, Fabiano made a point of going to the back of the hall, to hear how it sounded there. Fabiano made no bones about it that what concerned him was not how you or he felt about it while doing it, or how Renee Fleming sounded to him when he was standing on the stage right next to her. What matters is the effect it has on the audience, all of the audience, including and especially the audience in the cheaper seats. Are they getting what they came for and they paid for?

Deepest thanks to GD2 for enabling me to witness all this.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Getting old – BBC Music – Lego Tower Bridge – etc.

One of the problems of getting old is that it becomes gradually harder to do more than one thing in a day. This being why my daily postings here are often rather perfunctory.

This morning, for instance, I had a most enjoyable meeting with a friend, and then, the weather being so good, I went wandering about in Soho. That’s two things there, right away. Now, all I am capable of is rather incoherent rambling about nothing very much.

I did, while meandering about in the south of Oxford Street area, finally manage to track down the latest issue of the BBC Music (by which is meant classical music) magazine, which is getting harder to come by with every year that passes. Another symptom of advancing years being that it gets harder to buy the things that you particularly like, as others who also like that thing die off.

But, good news: the BBC’s preferred best performance of the Beethoven Hammerklavier Sonata was a rather obscure recording by the rather obscure pianist, Peter Serkin, who is the less famous son of the famous pianist Rudolf Serkin. I have so many CDs that I often can’t be sure whether I own some particular CD or not, and so it was with this one. But after some rootling around, I discovered that I do possess this CD. I love it when that happens.

And yes, since you ask, I am influenced by critics. If someone who knows the piece in question very well thinks that this or that performance is very, very good, then I know that I will at least want to hear this performance, even if I don’t end up sharing the critic’s high opinion, which often I do. This recommendation means I will now listen to this CD again.

The other thing I did was take a close look at a camera that I have been tempted by, but will probably not be buying, although it was interesting. This was in a shop called Park Cameras in Rathbone Place.

Inside Park Cameras Rathbone Place I also took this photo, with the camera that I already possess:

Good to encounter a new bridge of interest, even if it is only a miniature Lego version of an old bridge. I have no idea why such a bridge was in Park Cameras Rathbone Place, but I wasn’t complaining.

I get the distinct impression that a golden age of bridge building arrived about thirty or forty years ago, but has now departed. I just picture googled new bridge, and I mostly got bridges I have known about for quite a while.

I digress.

The great Classical CD Holocaust of December 2017: The struggle continues

Bad news: water continues to drip from my kitchen ceiling. Good news: I have contrived a way to divert it onto my draining board, using the lid of one of those big transparent plastic boxes, upside down so working as a shallow water capturer, with a hole drilled into it to let the water out, this side of the shelves below, all now evacuated of course. This means that I don’t have to get up every hour of the night to empty a bucket. The water finds its way to my sink automatically. Good.

Two further bits of good news. Good, relatively speaking. Good compared to how things might have been.

One, it turns out that the paper they use to print the sleeve notes of CDs doesn’t stick to itself when wet. It does stick, a bit, to plastic. But not to another bit of paper similarly soaked. This is good news, and will significantly reduce the total damage compared to what I had feared. This was why I said “Bugger” yesterday. Unbugger.

Two, it turns out that the guy living above me, who I had supposed to be the guilty party in this, what with him finding a dodgy-looking connection in the pipe attached to his washing machine, is another victim of this atrocity, rather than its perpetrator and perpetuator. So, instead of being on my own in a fight with my neighbour directly above me, he is an ally in a battle we are both now fighting with whoever, above the both of us, is responsible for this crime against humanity. Since he is an assertive, capable, early-middle-aged, educated Scotsman, I’m very glad indeed that he is on my side rather than my potential adversary.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Ashes lost – CDs soaked – cranes in the sunset

A mixed day. In the morning, Australia won the Ashes back. And in the evening, when I got back from a photo-expedition, I found water trickling down the wall of my kitchen, the wall in question being the one behind me in the picture at the top of this blog, a wall filled with CDs, a quite large number of which had their documentation soaked. It could have been a hell of a lot worse, but it wasn’t at all good. I have just spent most of the evening trying to sort that out, but probably not accomplishing much. Many pages of musical info will be stuck together irrevocably. Bugger.

But in between those two disasters, the photo-expedition was pretty good. I will surely show more of its results here Real Soon Now. For the moment, following an evening spent fretting about those CDs, here is just one such result:

I tend not to like sunsets, by which I mean that I tend not to like the photos I take of sunsets. But if there are cranes involved, that’s a different story. Also, for the cricket, a sunset is all too appropriate.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

David Starkey on how Handel trumped Shakespeare

I have started reading Music & Monarchy, by David Starkey and Katie Greening. What the division of labour is between these two (Starkey is in larger letters thatn Greening on the front cover) I do not know, but it certainly starts very promisingly. I have already encountered two passages worthy of prolonged recycling here, the one that starts the book (see below), and the bit that follows, about England’s profound medieval musicality.

So, to begin where Starkey and Greening begin, here is how the introduction of this book launches itself (pages 1-2):

Music or Words? Poetry and Drama? Or Anthems, Opera and Oratorio? Which, to personalise and particularise, is the more important in British history and to the British monarchy: the anniversary of Shakespeare or the centenary of Handel? The question almost seems absurd. Nowadays there is no doubt that Shakespeare wins every time. Shakespeare’s cycle of history plays, famously described by another maker of history, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, as ‘the only history I ever read’, still shapes the popular understanding of English history and its murderous dynastic rivalries; while in their nobler moments the plays (re-)invent the idea of England herself before going on to adumbrate a larger, mistier vision of Britain:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this sea of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-Paradise …
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea …
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings …
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land.

Who could resist that? George III (1760-1820) for one, who confided to Fanny Burney: ‘Was there ever such stuff as a great part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so!’ The eighteenth century more or less agreed with its longest reigning king. The bicentenary of Shakespeare, celebrated five years late in 1769, was a provincial pageant, which, despite the best efforts of the actor-manager David Garrick, made little impact outside the Bard’s birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon and, thanks to torrential rain, was literally a washout even there. On the other hand, the centenary of Handel’s birth (celebrated a year early by mistake in 1784) was a grand national event the like of which had never been seen before: not for the greatest general, politician or king, let alone for a mere musician. Fashionable London fought (and queued) for tickets; Westminster Abbey was crammed and ladies were instructed not to wear excessive hoops in their dresses while hats were absolutely forbidden. Even then, demand was unsatisfied and two of the events had to be rerun.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Is Martha Argerich about to go solo again?

I have been collecting all of Martha Argerich’s, formerly EMI and now Warner, CD boxes of performances at her annual Lugano Festivals. These sets have contained an agreeable mixture of familiar and unfamiliar works, and are also amazing value.

The latest and, we are told, last of these boxes (the Lugano Festival itself is coming to its end) contains a major surprise in the form, first up, of a solo piano performance by Argerich herself. The surprise being because Argerich, a long time ago now, said that she would not be performing any more piano solo music. She prefers to play along with other musicians. Concertos are fine. This is not an I-don’t-like-being-centre-stage thing. When playing a concerto, she is playing along with a conductor and an orchestra. She just doesn’t like playing on her own, without anyone else on the platform.

Until now. From the sleevenotes:

Among the many inviting prospects was a performance by Argerich herself of Ravel’s solo-piano Gaspard de la nuit. She had also performed it the previous month in Beppu, Japan, and this marked a return for the first time in 33 years to a piece that had been associated so closely with her during her early career. She ingeniously bypassed her ban on solo performance by inviting her daughter Annie Dutoit to read the poetry by Aloysius Bertrand that inspired Ravel’s hallucinogenic and technically daunting piano suite.

Ingeniously? That’s one way of putting it. Tortuously might be another, not to say: bizarrely. Anyway, I am listening to the suitably Halloweeny Gaspard now, and it sounds very good.

There are enough wondrous pianists around, still emitting wondrous solo piano CDs, for one more or less not to be a colossal issue. But, it would be nice if Argerich recorded some more solo piano works. All that will be needed will be for daughter Annie to provide a suitable reading of something or other to go along with each solo performance, so that Mother Martha could pretend she isn’t playing solo. Or, here’s a plan, she could just say: from now on, I think I will do some more solo stuff. Only a few internet idiots would complain.

My guess is that what Argerich is really put off by is not the solo performing, but all the hours of solo practising that she would feel the need to do. After all, when she performed Gaspard, to an audience, she was absolutely not alone. There was an audience. I’ve just heard their enthusiastic clapping. (Now I am listening to Busoni’s Violin Concerto, I’m pretty sure for the first time. This is the kind of thing I especially like about these Lugano boxes.) No, it’s the endless solitary confinement of practise that she got fed up with when she had to do it, all the time, and dreads returning to. Now, she presumably still has to do lots of private practise, but at least she can have fun rehearsing with others, as well as performing. And chamber music is cheap enough on the salary front to enable hours of rehearsing, and also something that rewards such practise, come the performance. It’s an ideal fit for Argerich.

So sadly, my guess is that this Gaspard was an exception that proves the rule rather than any sort of more lasting breaking of the rule, an abberation rather than a harbinger of more solo things to come.

On the other hand, now I come to think of it, on CD2 of this box there is a performance, which I have yet to hear, of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, for piano, orchestra and singers. I love this piece. But more to my point here, much more, it starts with quite a big chunk of piano solo stuff, before the orchestra and singers join in.

So, maybe Argerich really is feeling the need to do more solo playing.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

I don’t know whether it’s the weather or my camera

I have a new camera, and I am not as happy as I would like to be about the photos I am photoing with it. They often seem vague and blurry, as if seen through a mist.

But then again, the humidity levels during the last week or two have been very high. Maybe the views have all looked as if seen through a mist because they were seen through a mist.

Here, for instance, is a photo of a favourite building of mine, the big decorated box that is the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, as seen from Westminjster Bridge, which is quite a way away:

But I got to work with my Photoshop clone, and beefed up the contrast, and darkened things a bit.

Thus:

Which looks a bit better. I’ve chased away some of the mist. The trees look greener. The details of the ROH’s exterior decoration are clearer.

I have a vague recollection of trying to reset my camera, so that it did things more darkly and more contrastingly. Maybe at that point, I contrived to do the opposite of what I thought I was doing.

But then again, not long after taking that photo, I took this one, of the giant 4 outside the Channel 4 headquarters building at the top end of Horseferry Road, a short walk away from where I live. I often go past it on my way home after an afternoon of wandering, and so it was that day, nearly a week ago now:

That looks bright enough and clear enough, doesn’t it? That’s without any zoom, i.e. space filled with blurriness. And without this weather making its presence felt, the picture doesn’t look like it needs any artificial editing attention. So maybe the camera is fine, and it has been the weather. And I just made the weather better.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

One Kemble Street and its roof clutter as seen from the ROH floating bar

The best thing about seeing Turandot at the R(oyal) O(pera) H(ouse) earlier in the week was definitely seeing Turandot. But almost as good was what I saw during one of the intervals.

So, do you remember this?

The “this” I am referring to is the disembodied rectangular box hovering up near the roof there. I copied and pasted the sanskrit my blogging system demands for that photo from this earlier ROH posting. To quote my earlier description in that earlier posting:

I especially like that disembodied clutch of drinkers, suspended up there as if in mid air, but actually in mid mirror.

All of which means that you don’t need to remember it, because I just told you again.

Well, during the interval in question, I found myself stretching my legs inside this aerial box. From it, I got views like this:

Which was all very fine, although I can’t really tell how good or bad this photo is, because I only have this terrible little replacement screen to look at it on.

But then, things got even more interesting. I looked through that big semi-circular window, and saw other interesting things. In particular I saw this:

That is one of London’s finer assemblages of roof clutter, made all the more magnificent by being anarchically perched, like a tiny shanty town, upon one of London biggest and blandest and most geometrically severe pieces of sculpted Big Thingness from the Concrete Monstrosity era. Namely: One Kemble Street, which used to be known by the much cooler name of Space House.

If you image google for One Kemble Street, you get a deluge of photos of One Kemble Street, but just about all of them are taken from below. It’s like they’re ashamed of that marvellous roof clutter. But why? It is magnificent.

Here is another view of part of this roof clutter:

That was taken in December 2014, on the same day I photoed the floating bar in the sky, in the first photo, above.

Memo to self: check it out again, and try to photo the whole thing, in nice weather like that.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

How Michael Tanner both misunderstands and understands Turandot

Yesterday I attended a Royal Opera House Covent Garden dress rehearsal, of Puccini’s Turandot. Never having seen Turandot on stage before, I learned a lot. The singing was pretty good, especially the choral singing, but maybe I say “especially” about that because I generally prefer choral singing to “operatic” solo singing. The staging looked appropriately splendid and exotic.

But the best fun of all was, afterwards, finding this bizarre piece of writing by Michael Tanner, for the Spectator. What is bizarre is that Tanner disapproves of the characters and he disapproves of the “happy ending” at the end of Turandot, like some myopic Victorian moralist objecting to King Lear because of what sort of people they are and because of what happens at the end of that.

Turandot is obviously a very wicked and tyrannical ice-queen type of a woman. But Calaf earns Tanner’s special condemnation. This is because Calaf, being from Asia in olden times rather than the Home Counties of England now, prefers conquest, sexual and political, to the love of a good woman. He is going to subjugate Turandot, sexually and politically, or die trying, and damn the consequences. But in Michael Tanner’s world tenors are not supposed to think and behave like that. Their job is to embody virtue, not watch while the slave girl who has been in love with Calaf throughout the opera is tortured and then commits suicide to spare herself more torture. After which Calaf carries right on with subjugating Turandot. But the fact that Calaf is not the sort of person whom Tanner would want marrying his sister is rather beside the point. Or to put the same point a quite other way, it is exactly the point. It isn’t just the setting of Turandot that is exotic. These are profoundly different sorts of people to those that Michael Tanner, or for that matter I, approve of.

This is like denouncing the Ring Cycle because Wotan is a god rather than a geography teacher, or because the dragons in the Ring Cycle do not behave like hedgehogs.

Calaf was also criticised by Tanner for standing still and just singing, instead of doing lots of “acting” in the modern style. But Calaf’s whole character is that of a would-be ultra-masculine tyrant. And tyrants instinctively exude power and strength, for instance by standing still in a very masculine chest-out pose, and singing very sonorously, rather than by doing lots of fidgety acting. It is their underlings and victims who do all the acting, by re-acting to people like Calaf.

However, it often happens that critics who denounce works of art in rather ridiculous ways nevertheless understand them very well, and often a lot better than the people who say that they like them. They absolutely get what the artist was doing. It’s just that they don’t happen to like it. I recommend Tanner’s piece as a way of understand how very different Calaf and Turandot are from their equivalents in, say, La Boheme.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A list of well-known currently performing classical pianists

Classical music making is mostly museum curation. Nothing wrong with that, because it is the best museum ever. But that is what it mostly is. Perhaps for this reason, it has long been speculated that classical music would soon stop being re-performed or re-recorded. But there seems to be little sign of this happening.

Here, to illustrate the non-demise of classical music making, is a list of currently performing pianists. It was rather hastily compiled. Perhaps some of those listed have retired. Some may even have died. And there are surely many omissions, including, quite possibly, some major omissions, including, for instance people who I am assuming to be retired or dead who are nothing of the kind.

Also, there must be a huge number of Asian pianists who are very, very good, but who I have simply not noticed the existence of. I live in London, and this list surely reflects that, both with its inclusions and its exclusions.

The number at the end of each clutch is simply me counting how many there are starting with each letter, thereby making it easier for me to count the total. It came to: 175.

Depending on how you determine inclusion or exclusion, the list could be far longer. I went for things like: Have I personally heard of them? Have they done recent recording? Are they hailed as good by classical music critics? Do I personally like their playing?

I seriously doubt whether there have ever before been as many pianists roaming the earth, performing this amazing music, mostly by dead people.

So, here we go:

Pierre-Laurent Aimard – Dimitri Alexeev – Piotr Anderszewski – Leif Ove Andsnes – Nicholas Angelich – Martha Argerich – Vladimir Ashkenazy – Yulianna Avdeeva – (8)

Sergei Babayan – Andrea Bacchetti – Daniel Barenboim – Martin James Bartlett – Jean-Efflam-Bavouzet – Alessio Bax – Mark Bebbington – Markus Becker – Boris Berezovsky – Boris Berman – Michel Beroff – Kristian Bezuidenhout – Jonathan Biss – Christian Blackshaw – Rafal Blechacz – Frank Braley – Ronald Brautigam – Yefim Bronfman – Rudolf Buchbinder – Khatia Buniatishvili – (20)

Bertrand Chamayou – Frederic Chiu – Seong-Jin Cho – Arnaldo Cohen – Imogen Cooper – (5)

Alexandra Dariescu – Lise de la Salle – Jorg Demus – Jeremy Denk – Peter Donohoe – Barry Douglas – Danny Driver – Francois-Rene Duchable (8)

Severin von Eckardstein – Michael Endres – Karl Engel – (3)

Til Fellner – Vladimir Feltsman – Janina Fialkowska – Ingrid Fliter – David Fray – Nelson Freire – Benjamin Frith – (7)

Ivana Gavric – Alexander Gavrylyuk – Boris Giltberg – Havard Gimse – Bernd Glemser – Nelson Goerner – Anna Gourari – David Greilsammer – Helene Grimaud – Benjamin Grosvenor – Horacio Guitierrez – Francois-Frederic Guy – (12)

Marc-Andre Hamelin – Wolf Harden – Rustem Hayrouodinoff – Martin Helmchen – Angela Hewitt – Peter Hill – Ian Hobson – Stephen Hough – Leslie Howard – Ching-Yun Hu – Bruce Hungerford – (11)

Valentina Igoshina – Ivan Ilic – (2)

Peter Jablonski – Paul Jacobs – Ingrid Jakoby – Martin Jones – (3)

Cyprien Katsaris – Freddy Kempf – Kevin Kenner – Olga Kern – Evgeny Kissin – Mari Kodama – Pavel Kolesnikov – (7)

Piers Lane – Lang Lang – Dejan Lazic – Eric Le Sage – John Lenehan – Elizabeth Leonskaja – Igor Levit – Daniel Levy – Paul Lewis – Yundi Li – Jenny Lin – Jan Lisiecki – Valentina Lisitsa – Louis Lortie = Alexei Lubimov – Nikolai Lugansky – (16)

Joanna MacGregor – Alexander Madzar – Oleg Marshev – Denis Matsuev – Leon McCawley – Alexander Melnikov – Gabriela Montero – Joseph Moog – Vanessa Benelli Mosell – Olli Mustonen – (10)

Jon Nakamatsu – Eldar Nebolsin – Francesco Nikolosi – David Owen Norris – (4)

Noriko Ogawa – Garrick Ohlsson – Gerhard Oppitz – Christina Ortiz – Steven Osborne – Alice Sara Ott – (6)

Enrico Pace – Murray Perahia – Javier Perianes – Alfredo Perl – Maria Perrotta – Daniel-Ben Pienaar – Maria Joao Pires – Artur Pizarro – Jonathan Plowright – Awadagin Pratt – Menahem Pressler – Vassily Primakov – (12)

Beatrice Rana – James Rhodes – Pascal Roge – Alexander Romanovsky – Martin Roscoe – Michael Rudy – (6)

Fazil Say – Konstantin Scherbakov – Andras Schiff – Dimitris Sgouros – Howard Shelley – Grigory Sokolov – Andreas Staier – Kathryn Stott – Martin Stadtfeld – Yevgeny Sudbin – (10)

Alexandre Tharaud – Jean-Yves Thibaudet – Cedric Tiberghien – Sergio Tiempo – Geoffrey Tozer – Daniil Trifonov – Simon Trpceski – Noboyuki Tsujii – (9)

Mitsuko Uchida – Florian Uhlig – (2)

Nick Van Bloss – Denes Varjon – Stephan Vladar – Lars Vogt – Arcadi Volodos – (6)

Wiayin Wang – Yuja Wang – Ashley Wass – Llyr Williams – Ingolf Wunder – Klara Wurtz – (6)

Christian Zacharias – Krystian Zimmerman – (2)

That’s a lot of pianists. All the major items of the piano repertoire have each received numerous recordings, and they each get performed somewhere on earth about every other day, and in the case of the popular piano concertos, several times a day. It just refuses to stop. The classical audience keeps aging, and then dying, only to be replaced by more aging people, who also then die, and so it goes on.

Real comments here are very rare, so all real comments on this would be very welcome. But especially welcome would be comments informing me of major omissions to that list.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog