Making Music with Alfred Cortot
Audio Version (to download right-click and 'Save link as...')
- Speaker(s):
- Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (King's College London) and Chair: Jonathan Summers (British Library)
- Event date:
- Thursday 09 December 2010
School of Advanced Study, University of London
- Description
-
Cortot’s piano playing offers many opportunities to consider the relationship between sound, meaning, emotion, calculation, personality, society, and music. The key evidence at the heart of these interrelationships can be found in an analysis of recordings of his core repertoire, to which he returned again and again. A study of his 1926 and (recently rediscovered) 1928 recordings of Chopin Préludes, alongside discussion of his teaching and administrative activities at the Ecole Normale de Musique and for the Vichy government, will be used as a focus for a discussion of Cortot’s mythical expressive spontaneity.