Leslie Howard beguiled his predominantly Chinese audience with his down to earth way of expressing his extraordinary scholarship and mastery of the piano. To hear him describe Glinka’s magical ‘The lark’ as a tree with tinsel but a tree with solid roots was so refreshingly simple and surely recalls Chopin’s own description of that elusive much abused word ‘rubato’.
Anton Rubinstein described the pedal as the soul of the piano as Leslie knows well having made a premiere recording of his four sonatas adding even more neglected masterpieces to the catalogue together of course with his 100 CD set of the works of Liszt.
And it was the pedal and scrupulous attention to the original intentions of the composer that was the valuable message we were reminded of today.
Read more here at Christopher Axworthy’s blog
