Month: February 2021

Even a sideways glance at great pianist Annie Fischer’s left hand tells you that she could throttle pigs with it. Plough fields. Dig trenches. Or murder Liszt’s most difficult piano music. Taken decades ago by Jeno Szots for Jozsef Gat’s famous tome The Technique of Piano Playing, the snap demonstrates a key attribute of great ‘piano’ hands — long little fingers. Most great pianists have big, strong, peasant hands with long little fingers. For the most demanding music they help …

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Actually, nowhere is a good country for elite young pianists. Especially terrifying is the stage of a 2000-seat concert hall where a big black Steinway is waiting to abuse you. Formidable Australian pianist Noel Mewton-Wood had just turned 31 when he drained a tumbler of liquid cyanide in the front room of his home, now in a posh inner-London suburb. Mewton-Wood had recently lost his partner Bill. But he was a promiscuous homosexual, and it was 1953. Were the police …

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Two months after the death in a 1953 air crash of the great New York pianist William Kappell, the equally brilliant Australian keyboard artist Noel Mewton-Wood drained a tumbler of prussic acid — cyanide – in the front room of this London house. He threw the empty glass at a wall in which police later found shards. Many suicide notes were scattered around the room. Why does a musician already world-renowned kill himself? The narrator of my debut novel The …

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