In 1957 the Australian-American composer Percy Grainger, then 75 and in failing health, received a letter from another pianist-composer, the young Ronald Stevenson, writing from his home in West Linton, below Edinburgh. That first contact - requesting Grainger's reminiscences of Ferruccio Busoni, with whom he had studied - led to an exchange of 32 letters over the four years before Grainger's death in February 1961. The two men soon found that, despite their 46-year age-difference, they had many affinities. Both were pianists of staggering abilities and composers who combined a love for...
In 1957 the Australian-American composer Percy Grainger, then 75 and in failing health, received a letter from another pianist-composer, the young Ron...
This first volume of selections of his writings brings together many of Brian's principal writings on the composers and events of the British Musical Renaissance from polemical articles written when actively campaigning for his fellow-composers in the Midlands before World War I to more considered appraisals of the inter-War period. As well as discussing a wide range of composers, from Elgar and Delius to Britten and Billy Mayerl, he can be found here reviewing festivals, adjudicating at brass-band championships at the Crystal Palace (and watching the Palace burn down in 1936), proposing...
This first volume of selections of his writings brings together many of Brian's principal writings on the composers and events of the British Musical ...
The English composer William Alwyn was not only one of the most versatile creative figures of his age, writing music for the concert hall, recital room, operatic stage and film screen; he was also a virtuoso instrumentalist and conductor, the teacher of some of the most important composers of the succeeding generation, and the founder of a number of influential music committees such as the Composers' Guild of Great Britain. Alwyn was a gifted writer, too, alive to literature and art - especially pre-Raphaelite painting, on which he was an authority - as well as to music, and Composing in...
The English composer William Alwyn was not only one of the most versatile creative figures of his age, writing music for the concert hall, recital roo...
Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996), was one of the most important composers of his era, and the most important Danish composer after Carl Nielsen. In a book intended for the general reader, he discusses the nature of music, from the point of view of the composer, the performer and the listener. This is the first appearance in English of these important essays, originally published in Danish, under the title 'Music: the Inexplicable'. To the translation of this book several other essays have been added: Holmboe also writes on Stravinsky's 'Symphony of Psalms', 'Haydn and Tradition', on Nielsen, and his...
Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996), was one of the most important composers of his era, and the most important Danish composer after Carl Nielsen. In a book int...
Andre Tchaikowsky was only 46 when he died, internationally renowned as a pianist - and he made the headlines after his death when he left his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in performances of Hamlet. Yet for all his facility at the keyboard Tchaikowsky's real passion was composition. The internal conflict between pianist and composer compounded an already complex character. A Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, Tchaikowsky was also a homosexual. The diaries he kept between 1974 and his death chronicle the struggles that ran through his life. Debt kept driving him back to the...
Andre Tchaikowsky was only 46 when he died, internationally renowned as a pianist - and he made the headlines after his death when he left his skull t...
