Occasional updates

I sometimes get posted the odd online performance from some of our performers, but they are on Facebook and so I ‘share’ them to our Facebook site at https://www.facebook.com/mastermusicians

Today it was Tom Hicks and last was Lee Jae Phang. If you dont use Facebook for some reason, then short of your going to youtube.com and searching by the name of the pianist then I’m afraid you will have stick to your radio.

Since most of us are ‘of an age’, you will, like Ernie and myself, have had your first jab and await the second in the hope it keeps us safe.

Although I am sure that Ernie is piling up bookings for the future I personally can barely see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Still I hope there is nobody to cross off my mailing list so – stay safe.

J.S.

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Hot off the press from Will Bracken

Tune in to BBC radio 3’s afternoon concert tomorrow, Monday 21st Dec at 4:10PM to catch my performance of Detlev Glanert’s 4 fantasies for piano op. 15! I had the wonderful opportunity to work on these pieces with Mr. Glanert in the weeks running up to the concert in which the recording was made.https://www.radiotimes.com/…/afternoon-concert–winter…/

Will does well

News from Will Bracken to help you through these quiet times.

Delighted to announce that I was this year’s winner of the Guildhall School’s Glass Seller’s Beethoven Prize! You can watch the streaming of the final at the link below, which will be available until 16th Dec

https://www.gsmd.ac.uk/autumn_2020/music_prizes/

No more this year

Dear Friends,

I am writing this just before the current lockdown expires to tell you that regretfully, all Master Musician recitals will cease until further notice. Some of the venues have already closed until Christmas, and the uncertainties that surround us at the moment make planning impossible. As soon as some sort of normality comes about, you will be updated as to what is happening..

Take care,

Ernie Scott 

Luke Jones online recital while you are waiting

This is an online recital that I filmed for the North Wales International Music Festival last September. This recital is now available for everyone to watch on my YouTube Channel. https://youtu.be/qO8en8w5a5Q

Autumn update

It was pleasing to see so many at our recent recitals. Obviously those recitals scheduled for November were postponed, but every attempt was made to rearrange them for early December. Please keep looking here and we will post any updates to the site when we know more.

The advertised December recitals should go ahead as planned.

Out of silence

Dear Friends,

Welcome back after some nine recital-starved months. In spite of the omnipresent coronavirus, certain of my recital venues have come available, which enables me to arrange some 15 recitals between now and Christmas. These venues are Covid- 19 Secure and although necessary codes of practice have to be adhered to, I’m sure that the small changes to our normal way of doing things will be of small importance compared to the return of live music. For instance face masks must be worn when moving around i.e. on entering and leaving venues, but removed when seated. A track & trace system will be in operation, but only telephone numbers are required. I, myself will be the only person privy to this information, and is a bit ironic as ,over a period of thirty-odd years, I know most people’s numbers anyway!  

We have temporarily lost a venue (required social distancing at the venue at the 6^th Form College on Queen Alexander Road leaves room for only a handful of audience, and so this is mothballed for the present. However, an evening venue has been added, namely All Saints Church, Gosforth, and should prove an exciting new venue for our artistes. The Yamaha from the Y Studio is much more suited to the spacious church, and has been replaced at the 6^th Form College by a less-strident 6’6” Danemann grand that I just happened to have lying around!

With three old friends of Master Musicians “stepping up to the plate” performing five recitals each, we’ve started afresh just in time to celebrate Beethoven’s 250^th anniversary on December 16^th, and you’ll see we have a fair smattering of  “Ludwig” throughout.  I, and friends, together with some congregation members of the church venues, will  do our utmost to make a success of this tentative step into the unknown.

Be assured of our commitment during these next fifteen recitals. If there is anything I have omitted, just ask!!

I look forward to seeing you later this month.

 Best wishes,

 Ernie Scott

Something to cheer you up

Our long time friend and world famous pianist Jonathan Plowright is doing a live recital from Wigmore Hall on 22nd October at 7.30pm.

You would have to register on the Wigmore Hall’s site to watch it. Do that here

Another of our performers Evgeny Samoyloff has received high praise for his latest Mussorgsky recording.

“Hi Jim, Hope you are well. Just wanted to forward to you my new review on Mussorgsky CD from Gramophone magazine September edition. Maybe you can upload on Master musicians website… Author: Jeremy Nicholas A small UK label with a recording made in November 2016 and December 2017 at the VS Popov Academy of Choral Art, Moscow, by a prize winner at several international competitions and professor at London’s Blackheath Conservatoire. So how does Evgeny Samoyloff acquit himself in this attractive programme? The answer is: very well indeed. All-Mussorgsky piano albums are few and far between and, so far as I know, apart from Nikolaus Lahusen on Celestial Harmonies this is the only one currently available that offers Night on the Bare Mountain (arr Konstantin Chernov), Pictures at an Exhibition and a selection of miniatures. Samoyloff, who cut his teeth in the Special Music School of Novosibirsk, may not always be the most tonally alluring pianist, nor the best recorded, but for vivid characterisation and bold, muscular gestures, he is right on the money in the transcription, even more malevolent than Boris Berezovsky and making the more refined virtuosity of Simon Trpčeski sound as if the latter is playing a piano étude rather than a dramatic tone poem. After that comes a convincing sequence of the pianist’s own devising in which he seeks to complement Mussorgsky’s two unfinished suites (Children’s Games and Memories of Childhood) with five other miniatures to create a charming new suite of eight pieces. Samoyloff leaves you wondering why some of these, written between 1859 and 1880, are not better known, illustrating as they do Mussorgsky’s musical development, his penchant for quirky harmonies, and capricious, unexpected narrative twists and turns. Finally Pictures, in which Samoyloff’s assertive pianism again serves him well, even if the opening salvos of ‘Gnomus’ are not quite as unnerving as Horowitz’s. In the main, he adheres to Rimsky’s edition but is not above not above substituting bass octaves with left-hand trills in the second-half of ‘Gnomus’ (most effective, and anticipating the trills in the succeeding section), ignoring the repeat in ‘Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle’, arpeggiating the opening chords of ‘The Great Gate’, and other small details. Samoyloff is not all barnstorming bluster, though, and produces a truly lovely tone (con delicatezza, as requested) in ‘Promenade 2’ and ‘The Old Castle’. All in all, here is a pianist with personality who has something individual to say about this music.

Note from Ernie: “Many of you signed up for Evgeny’s CD when he was here last December, but the corona virus held up the printing. I’ll ask him to send off a couple of boxes, and you can pick them up at mine or I can post.”

Keep looking here as he tells me that there will soon be good news of recitals.