Beethoven's journey through the rapidly developing world of the piano can be traced through the seven pianos that he played during his lifetime.
Copies of all of them have been built from scratch by piano maker Chris Maene.
When living in Bonn, Beethoven visited the Stein workshop in Augsburg and got to know the instruments thoroughly. The sound was light and very clear, but the touch was like a harpsichord’s. Striking …
Psychophysical skills, intelligence, family environment, studies, career already covered (from the performance of the twenty-four Chopin Studies at the Circolo della Stampa in Milan in 1957, to the second prize at the Geneva Competition in the same year, to the debut at La Scala in Ghedini's Fantasia in 1958, to the first prize at the Seregno Competition in 1959), explain Maurizio Pollini's participation in the 1960 Warsaw Chopin Competition and …
It is Christmas Eve in 1850 and the "Columbus Times & Sentential" publishes the announcement of the sale of a twenty-acre (8-hectare) manor house and estate just outside Columbus, Georgia, on the Alabama border.
The owner, Wiley F. Jones, covered in debt, adds that the auction house Harrison's is also selling "a dozen Negro slaves raised in Georgia" (translated: raised up properly) including a coachman and a good seamstress.
Without failing the clarification, …
The recital is an invention of romanticism or, more exactly, of an intensely romantic artist, Franz Liszt, and of an artist, Ignaz Moscheles, who was always looking at romanticism with a little reserve.
The term "recital on the piano" was adopted by Liszt in London on June 9, 1840.
Before inventing the denomination, however, Liszt he had invented the event: the show of a musical solitary knight struggling with a dragon called …
In his lifetime J.S. Bach was a reputed musician in a small geographical-cultural area of Germany, and after his death, in 1750, he was known only to scholars.
He became a representative of the German nation thanks to Nikolaus Forkel, who in 1802, in the full eruption of nationalism caused by the Napoleonic wars, published his About life and art of J.S. Bach.
From Forkel onwards the figure of Bach did nothing …