It’s MMM time! Welcome to the January edition.

This month’s round up is very piano-heavy, including a magnificent concert lecture by Brendel, and a few other reminders of just how many different lives the piano can lead.

Enjoy!

Composers and their pianos

This is a fascinating video exploring pianists performing on the actual pianos owned by composers themselves.

In particular, I’d check out the Beethoven pianoforte and its immense sustain. It can make a chord sound like a whole building is falling over!

There’s something quietly disarming about listening to these extracts. We spend so much time thinking of “the piano” as a neutral, standardised object, when in reality composers were responding to very specific instruments — their weight, resistance, decay, unevenness, even their flaws.

Hearing pianists adapt their touch to these older instruments reminds us that technique and repertoire is never abstract. Sound is always embodied, historical, and contingent, not standardised. It’s also a gentle corrective to the idea that progress automatically means improvement.

Liszt’s ‘Années de pèlerinage’

God I miss this sort of thing on television. And what do we get now? Married At First Effing Sight.

This is an extended video of the late, great Alfred Brendel performing selections from ‘Années de pèlerinage’ by Liszt, a recent regular rotation of mine, interspersed with his thoughtfulspoken commentary. The whole thing is an absolute gift.

Brendel’s playing here is, as ever, thoughtful, unsentimental, and deeply humane — but it’s the lectures that make this especially valuable. He talks about structure, rhetoric, poetry, and restraint… all in an accessible, unfussy way without mystification or pretentiousness.

As it happens, the Kino Theatre in St Leonards will soon be host to a live performance of the first (and best) book of ‘Années de pèlerinage’.

Tickets here:

Live music, especially piano music, simply behaves differently in a room with real listeners, so I highly recommend treating yourself!

Scarlatti and his 555 sonatas

I’m on huge Scarlatti kick at the moment and this video is a wonderful reminder of how strange and inventive his music still sounds. And the story behind the man is even more fascinating.

It’s easy to forget just how experimental this music was, and still is. Crossed hands, repeated notes, guitar-like textures, rhythmic relentlessly, huge booming chords, jarring harmonies and overtones, one moment alive and singing, and the next more like a percussive, broken down machine.

As much I love it on the piano, there’s something about the Kirkpatrick recordings on harpsichord that give you a real sense of Scarlatti’s relentless, euphoric and otherworldly sound.

Hauschka at NPR

And ending at the other extreme of the spectrum… prepared piano.

It was John Cage who came up with some of the very first prepared piano works, but Hauschka’s work is a brilliant, more contemporary example of how radically the piano can be reimagined with similar techniques.

In this short concert, Hauschka place objects directly on or between the piano strings, the instrument thereby something closer to a miniature percussion orchestra.

Just so much fun to watch and listen to.

As ever, happy listening, and happy experimenting.

— Will