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When Pianist hit the newsstand 20 years ago, nobody had heard of Daniil Trifonov (he would have been ten at the time). Here he is now, an instantly recognizable face on the cover, the model of a modern virtuoso. How much has changed (for all of us) since 2001! The 17-year-old Lang Lang had just made his London debut. Piotr Anderszewski had released his first album for Virgin Classics. British piano manufacturers such as Kemble were still thriving. I have looked back over many of the highlights in the life of Pianist with a retrospective article, remembering artists and instruments, teachers and scores, tuners and cats, and more.
How good it is that more and more pianists in our own time push the boundaries of ‘the repertoire’; something I try to do myself each issue with the choice of scores. Both in his conversation and his performances, Trifonov ranges across the entire spectrum of music written for the keyboard, and he does so with complete confidence, playing John Cage’s 4’33” as an encore after two hours of 20th-century music. It seems as though he can play everything, from Bach to Tchaikovsky to Adès and beyond.
With Brahms’s left hand transcription of Bach’s D minor Chaconne on his latest album, Trifonov demonstrates tremendous power and sovereign control of what, for most of us, is our ‘weaker’ hand. It needn’t be so: in order to bring out the Trifonov in you, Graham Fitch offers valuable left hand advice (I love his suggestions for learning Bach’s Prelude in C for LH alone) and Nils Franke covers Sartorio’s left hand arrangement of On Wings of Song and then surveys the surprisingly broad field of left hand repertoire.
More left hand-leaning discoveries in the Scores section include not only pieces for the left hand alone (there are two of those) but also pieces with unusual and challenging left hand parts, such as the third of César Franck’s Early Pieces, Les rêveries du Prince Églantine by that prince of the French salon, Reynaldo Hahn, and Rachmaninov’s Prelude Op 23 No 6. Our ultimate goal, of course, is to attain perfect control of both left and right hands – for which I direct you to Mark Tanner’s masterclass on balancing melody and accompaniment.
Finally, 20 years on, I would like to thank you, the readers. Many of you have been with us from the start. This is your magazine, and we wouldn’t be here without you. editor@pianistmagazine.com