Blog
David Nelson; Pianist and Artistic Director of Hebden Bridge Piano Festival
Our first festival took place this year in April and it was fantastic. Financially we did far better than we thought we would and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. We were trying out a brand new venue in the town which was taking a pretty major risk, but it...
Emilie Capulet: Markson Pianos Concert Series
"Water has always inspired composers and artists – it has texture and colour, it’s prismatic and vibrant, it catches the light and yet it can obscure the sun. Mist and fog create a sense of mystery and strangeness. For my recital on the 26th of June in the Markson...
Emma Hutchinson – Composer, Musician, Music School and Music Venue Founder
"I was given piano lessons because my brother didn't practice. This led to my life long love with the piano, and a fascination with playing all types of instruments. I was given a full grant to Chethams school until I was 19. I defected from music for a while,...
Jan Pulsford – Composer, Musician, Songwriter
my grandmother had a beautiful ornate walnut piano with ivory keys she cleaned with saucers of milk and rags I remember the smell and slight stickiness when I sat as a child with wide eyes glued to the music on a very high up velvet piano stool making up stories and...
Kate Shortt – Cellist, Pianist & Composer
"My mother was a piano teacher. We had a beautiful black grand Bluthner in our house when we grew up. We all played on it but I was obsessed with it from the age of around four. I was teaching myself and basically it was my recluse and my best friend. I started...
Nimrod Borenstein – Composer
"I have always loved the piano and just recently wrote a new cycle for solo piano which will be premiered by the pianist Konstantin Lifschitz in London in March 2014. The three pieces, 'Lucilla's Beehive' , 'Uchti-Tuchti' and 'The Melancholic Mobile' are part of a...
Ratko Delorko – Concert Pianist & Composer
"I started composing when I was six years old. I was quite gifted and developed a good craft. My blood is basically Croatian and this explains why my rhythms are usually never 4/4. Sometimes I integrate Croatian folk themes. I refer to my compositional process...
The Ivory Duo Piano Ensemble
"PA We've been together artistically as a piano duo, and as a couple, for almost twenty years. We met very young, at the studio of our piano teacher. We spend time alone on our parts – sorting out technical details individually, so when we rehearse together...
Elena Riu – Concert Pianist & Piano Professor
"I am on a new project. Because of time management issues in recent years due to having a child, I've become more project based. When I sit down to practice I have a very good idea of what it is I'll be working at. I'm good at managing my time so, for example, I'll...
Ivo Varbanov & Fiammetta – Concert Pianists (and each others occasional page turner)
“IV We're really busy, I'm about to fly to Bulgaria to start a cycle of Brahms chamber works being performed between October and April. It's taken a year to set up; the musicians are from Denmark, France, Hungary, Germany, Slovakia and the UK, it was not easy to...
Michael Jones – Retired Physicist with European Space Agency
"I’ve been playing the piano almost all my life; I started the grades late so only got up to Grade 7 before I left school. After I got my Physics degrees I worked at the European Space Agency in Darmstadt for 36 years where I was responsible for a division that...
Alan Rusbridger – Editor in Chief, Writer & Pianist
“I got up to Grade VI piano when I was around 16, then I gave it up. I didn’t have the patience to do all the technical training that now, as an adult, I realise you have to do. I started again when I was 40. I’d inherited my mother’s old piano, a little...