The Chopin Currency - June 5th, 2008

Chopin News, Reviews, and Previews:

Preview: Playing a fugue of his favourite things
New Zealand Herald - New Zealand

Aussie pianist Piers Lane prepares to play a "friendly" in neighboring New Zealand...Chopin friends and colleagues Charles Alkan and Liszt, not to mention Liszt's student Eugene d'Albert are represented in the first half; Chopin after intermission....

The second half of Tuesday's programme will be the complete cycle of Chopin Preludes, a rare privilege in this part of the world. "Everybody knows certain of the Preludes, but there are others that people won't recognise, as you don't get to hear them apart from as part of the whole set," Lane says. "They are a wonderful kaleidoscope of ideas and emotions and it's extraordinary to hear how Chopin feels about each major and minor key on the piano because he goes through all 24 just as Bach did in his Well-Tempered Clavier."

Lane says he likes stories about the composers he plays and has thought about how Chopin might have played his own music. "Later in his life, he was frail. When he played in England towards the end, they complained they couldn't hear him at the back of the concert hall. In fact, his main criticism of other pianists was that they made the piano bark like dogs. He didn't like big-scale playing. His style was an intimate one; he drew people in rather than going out to meet them."

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Glasgow team piped into Paris to bid for role as City of Music
The Herald - Glasgow,Scotland,UK

More on the Glaswegan's bid to become a UNESCO City of Music...

... only nationally but internationally - Mendelsohn visited and was inspired by Scotland's landscapes, and Chopin took his first train ride in the city. ...

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Audible.com Wins Audiobook of the Year: The Chopin Manuscript ...
Business Wire (press release) - San Francisco,CA,USA

Multiple articles abound...

The Audie Award judges heralded the many innovative and collaborative aspects of The Chopin Manuscript, an original work that has continued to win praise ...

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Audible.com Wins Audiobook of the Year: The Chopin Manuscript ...
NEWARK, NJ----The leading provider of premium digital spoken audio information and entertainment, Audible, Inc., an Amazon.com, Inc. subsidiary , today announced the groundbreaking, original novel The Chopin Manuscript has been named ...
eCocoma Web Consultant - Web... - http://www.ecocoma.com

The Chopin Currency: June 4th, 2008

Chopin News, Views, Reveiws and Previews:

Musical home of Chopin, Mendelssohn and Lou Reed? It's Glasgow, of Course!
Times Online - UK

"Glasgow civic officials are in Paris on a mission to convince UNESCO that the city deserves world City of Music status..."

Making his city's case, Mr Winter himself pointed out that Frédéric Chopin, the great composer, is said to have taken his first train ride in Glasgow, while his contemporary, Felix Mendelssohn, had been inspired by the countryside nearby - or to be more precise, Fingal's Cave on the Island of Staffa, more than 100 miles to the northwest.

The bid document itself employed an unashamedly broad and colourful brush to the city's musical heritage. Vienna had Mozart and Beethoven; New Orleans had jazz; but Glasgow cites artists ancient and modern including Simple Minds, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Clare Grogan and (to the confusion of any Austrians at the Unesco reception) Franz Ferdinand. Some of those name-checked were only visitors to the city, including the Move (from Birmingham), Oasis (Manchester) and Lou Reed (New York)

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Thus Far, PS3 Eternal Sonata Exclusive to Japan
Game Reviews - Phoenix,AZ,USA

Want to play the acclaimed Chopin-flavored video game on something besides an xBox? Rotsa ruck...

PS3 owners/lovers of eccentric RPGs based on the delusions of a dying composer are out of luck, unless you live in the Land of the Rising Sun that is. A Namco Bandai US spokesperson has stated that the PS3 version of Eternal Sonata, the RPG based on the fictional world dreamed up by a fever-wracked Chopin on his deathbed, "is only announced for... Japan right now."

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Chopin-related podcasts:

Chopin to Dr. Dre: The Sounds of the Carillon
By webhelp@kuow.org (KUOW 94.9 Public Radio)

Seattle public radio profile of "Carillonist" Charlotte Dyke, and her choice of music for the University of Washington's set of bells...

If you walk the UW campus on a weekday morning, you'll hear a tradition that is nearly 100 years old. There are tuned bells called the carillon. We meet a student who plays everything from Mozart to hip hop. ...

Sound Focus Podcast - /programs/sound_focus.asp