Stumbled upon a wonderful documentary about Evgeny Kissin, one of the world's greatest living pianists. There's a short interview at the beginning, but most of the film is of his historic performance at the Royal Albert Hall, including several encores presented in full. Here's the first of the 11 part series on youtube:
The Haydn he plays in this documentary is a piece I've been working on for the past five months. Mine doesn't sound quite the same, but I'll blame my tools and say it's because my piano has not been tuned in years. (Piano tunings are expensive, and it's something I keep meaning to teach myself to do.)
It's a wonderful time to be interested in classical music, with so many resources available, videos and recordings of just about any piece in the musical canon. It makes me jealous of kids who are just starting to study piano today.
But here's a question for classical music fans to get all steamed up about: How come that Lady Gaga video with the tape over the nipples and the blurred out crotch has over 20 million views, but this historic performance by one of the greatest living pianists in the world has less than a thousand?
Oh well, I guess it doesn't matter. I'd rather be one of a small, exclusive audience, than watch Mr. Kissin hook up with Beyonce in an attempt to boost his youtube statistics.
Everytime i see those videos of Lady Gaga, i see how much our society has decayed since the 1960s, and how much we let things deteriorate since then. My grandfather used to play piano a lot, i play too, but i'm just a beginner.
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