Simon Barere was born in Odessa (then Russian Empire, now part of Ukraine) in 1896. He showed his pianistic prowess from an young age. Fellow Russian composer Alexander Glazunov had spotted Barere's talents early on, describing him as, "Anton Rubinstein in one hand and Franz Liszt in the other". Barere was soon studying at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he was taught by Felix Blumenfeld; the same pianist who taught …
"The earth is suffocating... Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won’t be buried alive."
This is what Chopin supposedly told his sister on his death bed in 1849.
The composer suffered with taphephobia – in other words, the fear of being buried alive. He was insistent that, after he passed away, he was to be cut open to make sure that he was definitely dead.
And so, after passing …
As pianists, we are often preoccupied with playing the correct notes dictated within the score, especially as the music we play becomes more and more technical and complicated.
How we play those notes and the musical decisions we make not only impacts the overall sound of the piece but is also how we express ourselves creatively as pianists.
These phrasing decisions are not only how we interpret the music but how we …
"His creation was spontaneous, miraculous.
He found her without looking for her, without foreseeing her.
It came to his piano, sudden, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he was in a hurry to make himself hear it by throwing it on the instrument.
But then began the most heartbreaking labor I had ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, irresolution and impatience to recapture certain details …
The double beat use of the metronome proposes that earlier composers used slower tempi by means of using the metronome differently then our current use.
In the double blue beat use of the metronome there are two parts of one beat: the back and forth of the pendulum oscillation is one event like the inhalation/exhalation of a breath, the systole/diastole of the hearth beat, or two halves of a day.
When the …