November 2009
8 posts
Coptic Dub
Plushmusic supremo Hayden Chisholm, along with long time Plushmusic friends Matt Penman and Jochen Rueckert, made a splash this week as part of The Embassadors. Their new release, entitled Coptic Dub, has been getting great reviews, including this one at the Milk Factory.
Watch in fullscreen to see in HD…
To your hands on a copy, head over to Amazon. Or check out Hayden, Jochen and...
Louis brings audience to their feet at QEH
On Monday evening we joined standing ovations at QEH, Southbank for Louis Lortie’s impressive performance of Chopin’s études. Returning to the repertoire for the first time in over twenty years, virtuoso pianist Lortie never let technical bravura or sentimentality smother the poetry in these great works.
Read Paul Gent’s excellent review of the concert in the Daily Telegraph,...
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Chopin études to audiences of 3000? Lortie knows...
Paganini started it. From the moment he took the stage in La Scala, virtuoso performers have been urged to play up to their “dark powers”, as though they were somehow in league with the Devil. Louis Lortie will cheerfully play along with this idea – but only up to a point. With Chopin in mind, he points out that the performer as circus animal is a relatively recent phenomenon, ‘because of...
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Plushmusic reveals Lortie's dramatic approach to...
Fryderyk Chopin, born 1810, never had the physical strength to become a recitalist in the modern sense of the word. Liszt and the younger Beethoven were quite happy playing for two or three hours at a time before a knowledgeable and critical audience. Chopin’s health was so frail, he was constantly having to deny rumours of his own death. Needless to say, he had to find some other way to be...
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Plushmusic films Lortie's return to Chopin's...
‘I try always to take a naive attitude towards a recording session like this,’ says the celebrated French-Canadian pianist Louis Lortie. ‘I could feel some kind of weight on my shoulders but it was only as I sat down to play that I realised that returning to Chopin’s études was a big, big challenge.’
After a ten-year break, Lortie has returned to the Chandos label....
Louis Lortie interview with Ivan Hewett
Ahead of Louis Lortie’s concert in London this Monday, the pianist discusses the challenge of performing Chopin’s fiendishly difficult etudes in an interview for the Telegraph.
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Louis Lortie brings Chopin and a Fazioli to the...
Monday’s recital by Louis Lortie at the Queen Elizabeth Hall promises to bring a bell-like clarity to even the most fiendish of Fryderyk Chopin’s 27 études.
Never mind, for the moment, the French-Canadian pianist’s global reputation; never mind his early induction to Chopin, or his previous recordings. (We’ll come on to all of that in subsequent posts) Let’s kick off this discussion, instead,...
Dilettante's Digital Composer-in-residence...
Matt and Kat from Plushmusic joined Dilettante for the live finale of a groundbreaking new contest.
Composers from around the world submitted entries in a quest to clinch the first year long ‘digital residency’. Three finalists were picked by a team of judges before the winner was elected by a global public through the classical music hub.
Last night the virtual community came...