<<  -- 3 --  John Bell Young    SUMMER PIANO IN THE BIG APPLE

If there was any single discernable theme around which the festival's artistic message coalesced, it was perhaps virtuosity in the service of music, not the other way round. That much seemed to be the very emblem of the contributions of the distinguished Spanish pianist, Alicia de Larrocha, whose masterclasses revealed as much about her interpretive thinking as they did to the students fortunate enough to play for her. Ms De Larrocha no longer plays in public, but from what I could tell, there's no reason she couldn't. She is as vivacious as ever. Her discussion with one student, the gifted Japanese pianist Mariko Arikawa, about the relative importance of the innumerable pedal points in the first book of Albeniz's Iberia (a work with which Ms De Larrocha has long been uniquely identified) illuminated these, in the context of the work's burnished sonorities, as a symbolic reference to Spanish bells.

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