Memories: Ivor Newton

'The Piccadilly Hotel both accepted and demonstrated the social values of the Edwardian age, the period of richness and elegance which survived the monarch who gave it his name and which was killed, with so much else of the old world, on the battlefields of the Marne, Mons, the Somme and Gallipoli. From my place at the piano, I could see the intricate social ballet as it was performed night after night before my eyes ... Saint-Saens, Ysaye, Rachmaninov, Backhaus and Moisewitsch, amongst other great musicians, were familiar figures at the Piccadilly Hotel, and Safonov, the great Russian pianist and conductor who came to London to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra, stayed there. He was an artist whom I came to know better, at that time, than any of these others, and his great kindness and encouragement are things I shall always remember. In Moscow [at the Conservatoire] he had been the piano professor of the composer Scriabin, whose music had an extravagant if brief period of fame in London after the First World War. At the Piccadilly Hotel he would often come to the piano on his way out of the dining-room and talk to me about music, illustrating what he had to say at the top of the keyboard with such a deep quality of pianissimo tone that I longed to emulate it.'

- At The Piano - Ivor Newton: The World of an Accompanist © Ivor Newton London 1966

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