Leeds is back

The Leeds International Piano Competition is underway again, and the full list of competitors can be found on its website here. With Leeds - actually, with most international piano competitions - I'm always struck by the dominance of pianists from Russia, China and, this year, Korea. But Italians have quite a history of doing well in this contest (especially ones with high cheekbones, for some reason) and there are even two British candidates for patriotic pianophiles to cheer on if so inclined. I will be interested to see how the hugely talented Tom Poster gets on.

Lack of numerous Brits in British competitions is a perennial grouch in this country, when anybody can be bothered writing about music competitions at all. But the explanation is really very simple. Pianists in Russia, China and Korea are valued highly, supported in their training by the state and taught thoroughly in a fine tradition and in a system of specialist music schools from the very beginning. Pianists in the UK, on the whole, are not. That's life.

My next novel, ALICIA'S GIFT, explores the life of a gifted young pianist growing up in Derbyshire. It's about what her talent does to her family, and what her family does to her talent. I am proof-reading it now. Writing this post is a displacement activity.

The Gypsy fiddler and the Norwegian footy fans...

One of the many remarkable things we saw in Budapest, where Norway was playing Hungary in a football championship qualifier...

UPDATE: More pics from my Budapest trip appear on my perma-site: go to my news page and look for the link to Budapest photos near the top.

Egeszegedre!

Been here, seen this...at last. I've been wanting to go to Budapest for decades. Friends who studied there would return with tales of stylistic expertise, pedagogical inspiration, extraordinary traditions, cheap music, cheaper opera tickets and excessively good cakes. Violinist friends flocked to Hungarian-born teachers living abroad (here or Canada); the great 19th-century violinists and the traditions they left behind sprang almost wholly from Hungary, including Josef Joachim and Leopold Auer and later Jelly d'Aranyi, who was Joachim's great-niece. As for Gypsy fiddling traditions, have you ever seen anything quite as astonishing as Roby Lakatos?

Now the place is an extraordinary melting pot of old and new, 19th-century Art Nouveau grandeur alongside communist-era concrete heaps, bullet-scarred, soot-covered buildings in downtown Pest contrasting with sleek, renovated, olde-worlde central Europe for tourists - but exquisite nonetheless - in Buda. Cranes everywhere. This is a city on the up, enchanting, atmospheric, disturbing, magical and irresistable. Grand yet gentle, forbidding yet vulnerable, the poetic soul of Budapest has got under my skin, and its continuity lies not least in its music.

More soon...

Vinylly?

The Guardian has a special offer today that could be good news for those of us who still have LPs, 33s, 45s and cassette tapes, but would like to transfer them into digital format. I hasten to add that I haven't tried this at home, so this post does not constitute a recommendation, just an indication of interest in the concept.

Could this be a solution to my archive of interview tapes? There are hundreds of the ruddy things, dating back more than 15 years, and although it's probably been crazy to keep them all, among them a few gems that I'd be sad to see rendered unplayable, eg Shura Cherkassky ("I don't know why I'm telling you all this..."); Witold Lutoslawski ("We played it through on the table edge..."); and Rosalyn Tureck ("I play Bach HIS way"). With my usual techno-uselessness, I've had no idea how to transform their outdated format.

Has anybody tried this system? Or any others?

Thought for the day

Found this as Quote of the Week on Tasmin Little's website:

"People who make music together cannot be enemies,
at least while the music lasts."

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)

More where this came from.