Friday, July 29, 2016

Watch Adorable Evan Le Flawlessly Perform Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 8


Toddler Evan Le has only been learning the piano for less than a year, but can already smash out virtuosic concertos from memory.
image: http://assets7.classicfm.com/2016/30/evan-le-piano-1469453964-article-0.png
Evan Le piano
Are you ready to feel inadequate? Evan Le is only five, but is already charming audiences with his performance of this Mozart piano concerto, even writing his own complex candenzas for the piece.
Evan is not from a musical family, but has shown a pure instinct for music performance and composition. At the age of three he would listen to nursery rhymes and pick them out on a toy keyboard, and by four it was clear he had perfect pitch and an uncanny knack for memorising complex piano pieces. He has already featured on the NBC talent show Little Big Shots .
Concerto No. 8 was written by Mozart in 1776 for the Countess Antonia Lutzow, a fine pianist in her day. It requires high agility, and Mozart often used it for his own teaching.

Watch Evan Le play here:

Though he is obviously a future piano superstar Evan’s main passion is composing his own masterpieces, which have already amazed his teachers. Evan Le is a name to remember for the future - but for now you can see him perform greats such as Bach, Beethoven and Clementi on his Facebook page.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Saturday Night at the Movies

Saturday Night at the Movies - 


Andrew delves into the murky world of film noir.
image: http://assets7.classicfm.com/2016/26/spellbound-hitchcock-1467280849-article-0.png
Spellbound Hitchcock
Tonight Andrew shines the spotlight on film noir, as suggested by listener Nicholas Nicoll.
The term, which is French for 'dark film', was first given to a style of films by a French critic Nino Frank in 1946, but the name wasn't used in Hollywood till many years later. The genre embraces a wide variety of plots and characters but all have a distinctively suspenseful mood about them.
Tonight Andrew has music ranging across the decades of this mysterious genre, including Spellbound by Miklos Rosza, The Maltese Falcon by Adolph Deutsch and Chinatown by Jerry Goldsmith.

Sunday, July 3, 2016

Maybe the Hardest Piece of Piano Music Ever Written

We think this might be the hardest piece of piano music ever written


Pianists everywhere, prepare yourself for possibly the most demanding piece of piano music ever written. *gulps*
image: http://assets1.classicfm.com/2016/25/kaikhosru-shapurji-sorabjis-opus-clavicembalisticum-1466433188-article-0.jpg
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji’s Opus clavicembalistic
This is a section of the score from Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji’s Opus clavicembalisticum. It’s hard to pronounce, but even harder to play.
image: http://assets.gcstatic.com/u/apps/asset_manager/uploaded/2016/25/kaikhosru-shapurji-sorabjis-opus-clavicembalisticum-1466431796-custom-0.png


For a start, it lasts for over four hours in total, spread across 12 movements. That would be bad enough if it was dead easy to play, but of course, it’s much worse. It’s  a fiend.

Don’t let the first bar fool you - here’s the opening movement:
And here’s the final one, about which the composer himself wrote: “The closing 4 pages are so cataclysmic and catastrophic as anything I've ever done—the harmony bites like nitric acid—the counterpoint grinds like the mills of God.”

Read more at http://www.classicfm.com/instruments/piano/features/hardest-piano-music-ever-written/#9gefP6ORJuuh3Vam.99