Advent 13: King Tut
It’s not polonaises that I hate, so much as polonais-ing. Playing a polonaise on the piano is on a par with sanding a dozen sash windows by hand, or scanning…
Advent 12: Being & Time
How an argument with Christopher Hampson turned into a total rethink of space and time. Well, in Tooting, anyway.
Advent 11: Rite and Wrong
Most of the time, my experience, education, instinct and what I’ve picked up from friends and colleagues serves me quite well when it comes to speculating and arguing about music…
Advent 10: Can I have that on a (2)
Another from Fido. About two minutes before class began officially, he came to the piano (it was an upright) and stood at it facing me, using the lid as a…
Advent 9: And for this I’d like….
Nothing makes me more uneasy than the kind of teacher who seems to imagine a music so perfect, so refined and so sublime to accompany their exercise that there is…
Advent 8: Reasons to be cheerful 5, 5, 4, 3, 11, 7, 6, 6, 9, 4, 4
Stravinsky’s Agon is a dastardly complex score, serialist, polyphonic, polyrhythmic, you name it, and Balanchine’s choreography takes no easy ways out. But that’s just the technical challenge of the piece,…