Dress Rehearsal

My guest on the 70th episode of Dress Rehearsal is Bulgarian pianist Ivo Varbanov, who is a leading figure of Bulgarian music and culture abroad. After a forced hiatus from performing between 2009 to 2012 due to leukaemia he has returned to the stage with impressive performances at the Royal Festival Hall, King’s Place, Cadogan Hall, and the Bulgaria Concert Hall. He is a recipient of the Ivan Vaz...

My guest on the 69th episode of "Dress Rehearsal", is New York-based pianist Eleonor Bindman, who is also an educator and a recording artist. Originally from Riga, Latvia, Ms. Bindman is known worldwide for her continued passion with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and for her dedication in creating “transcriptions” of Bach’s orchestral music for either piano solo or for piano duet. M...

My guest on the 68th episode of "Dress Rehearsal" is Pianist Danny Holt, who has been called “phenomenal” by the late music critic Alan Rich and hailed as one of the “local heroes” of the Los Angeles music scene, pianist Danny Holt brings his boundless energy and wit to unique interpretations of new music, 20th-century music, and obscure, unusual, and neglected repertoire from past centu...

My guest on the 67th Episode of "Dress Rehearsal", is Pianist Yerin Kim, who has been praised by the International Piano Magazine as a “pianist of beautiful finesse and golden tone” and “powerful and engaging, poetic and expressive with some truly original interpretive insights, all performed with a great technique” by Phoenix Classical. Dr. Yerin Kim is a recitalist, chamber musician, a...

In this episode of Dress Rehearsal we listen to some of Bach's music rendered through a less orthodox instrument, the Moog synthesizer. From the famous "Switched on Bach", a great album of the eighties, during the hour also featuring "The Art of Moog", a UK-based band that uses the Moog instrument to perform early music.

My guest on the 65th episode of "Dress Rehearsal" is British Violist, Educator and Record Producer, Annette Isserlis, who is a founder member of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestra Revolutionnaire et Romantique as well as a member of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, The London Classical Players and Andrew Parrot’s Taverner Players, where she became princi...

My guest on the 64th episode of "Dress Rehearsal" is Italian pianist, fortepianist and harpsichordist, Gian Maria Bonino, who graduated in piano performance at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan with Prof. Lydia Arcuri and at the Lucerne Conservatory with Maestro Myeczislaw Horszowski. He also graduated in harpsichord at the Conservatory of Genova in Italy with Prof. Alda Bellasich. He has p...

Sir András Schiff in conversation about the Piano Concertos of Johannes Brahms performed on a historical piano with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. To fully bring out the characteristics of Brahms’s music Schiff’s choice of instrument is a Blüthner piano built in Leipzig around 1859, the year in which the D minor concerto was premiered. The historically informed Orchestra of the Age of...

My guest on the 62nd episode of  "Dress Rehearsal" is violinist Valeria Zorina, who is an award winning performer and educator currently living Madrid, Spain. Ms. Zorina recently released a CD dedicated to the "scordatura" in violin repertoire through the centuries. The "scordatura" is defined by the Harvard Dictionary of Music, as “abnormal tuning of a stringed instrument in order to obtain...

My guest on the 61st episode of "Dress Rehearsal" is Italian harpsichordist, clavichordist and fortepianist, Enrico Baiano. Maestro Baiano is considered one of the most complete and interesting interpreters on the ancient music scene. In his interpretative approach, historical-stylistic rigor, expressive freedom and great virtuosity are wisely combined. The French music review “Le Monde...

The 60th episode of Dress Rehearsal, on 107.3 KBFG Seattle, featured British composer Edward Cowie, whose first BBC Proms commission was titled Leviathan, a large-scale orchestral work premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1975. This occasion marked the first major event in a career that would gain him national and international recognition for a new kind of ‘voice’ in the music world. Its ti...

The 58th episode of Dress Rehearsal, on 107.3 KBFG Seattle, welcomed Italian pianist and fortepianist Stefania Neonato, who has dedicated her life and musical career to historical keyboards and historically informed performance. Stefania graduated in piano performance at the Trento Conservatory and also earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Historical Performance Practice at Cornell University...

The 57th episode of Dress Rehearsal, on 107.3 KBFG Seattle, featured an instalment of a CBC program titled "The Art of Glenn Gould", in which Mr. Gould interviews Pianist Claude Frank about Artur Schnabel and plays Beethoven Piano Concerto 4 in G, Op.58, in the studio recording with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (USA). Gould was very fond of Schnabel's art, and t...

The 56th episode of Dress Rehearsal, on 107.3 KBFG Seattle, welcomed Seattle-based Anna Edwards, whose career as a violinist, educator, and symphony conductor has been inspired by her commitment to core values of high-quality musical performance, development of musicians and composers through music education, and community engagement. Anna is a passionate advocate for the music of underrepresented...

The 55th episode of Dress Rehearsal, on 107.3 KBFG Seattle, welcomed Italian pianists Riccardo Zadra and Federica Righini, who are partners in music as well as in life! Riccardo and Federica, for over twenty-five years, have shared an intense activity as concert performers and teachers with a constant exploration of the numerous disciplines and paths of personal growth. Riccardo and Federica today...

The 52nd episode of Dress Rehearsal, on 107.3 KBFG Seattle, featured musical movement called "New Complexity", which is characterized by the use of complex musical notation. During the hour we will listen to Michael Finnissy's entire English Country-Tunes. As Arnold Whittall reviewed it on Gramophone Magazine) he wrote "Anyone anticipating Graingerish essays in flamboyant folkishness will soon rea...

The 52nd episode of Dress Rehearsal, on 107.3 KBFG Seattle featured Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, who recently turned 75! A native of Palermo in Sicily, the young Sciarrino was attracted to the visual arts, but began experimenting with music when he was twelve. Though he had some lessons in composition he is primarily self-taught as a composer. During the hour will go through some signific...

The 51st episode of Dress Rehearsal, on 107.3 KBFG Seattle, welcomed composer Nimrod Borenstein, who in the past few years has been enjoying a great number of works being commissioned, recorded and premiered across the globe. His compositions are performed at some of the most prestigious venues and festivals throughout Europe, Canada, Australia, the Far East, Israel, South America, Russia and the...

The 50th episode of Dress Rehearsal reflects on the theme of Health vs Disease through the eyes and experiences of American Journalist Norman Cousins, who was given no chances of recovery from a seemingly incurable disease and who devised his own cure mainly by "laughing" and watching funny movies. During the hour several excerpts will be played, from a 1984 fictional movie that bears the same tit...

The 49th episode of Dress Rehearsal featured Glenn Gould's "The Idea of North", which is part filmed docudrama, part fantasy, part forerunner of music television. Based on the radio play by famed Canadian pianist, North's montage of words, images and music tells a universal story of the quest for our last frontier. A young man boards a train going North. It is a real train on a scheduled run, yet...

The 48th episode of Dress Rehearsal featured Roberta Vacca's new CD titled "Imaginary Dialogues". The new release of this project comes from the collaboration of visual artist Pierpaolo Mancinelli and Composer Roberta Vacca. The aim was to create a "bi-sensorial" work. "Imaginary Dialogues" expresses the need to combine different contemporary languages and artistic expressions created by the union...

The 47th episode of Dress Rehearsal, on 107.3 KBFG Seattle, welcomed Pianist Beverly Gilbert, who has been performing and teaching in the Atlanta region and also collaborated in chamber music with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra members and as a pianist with the Atlanta Symphony. With Beverly we talk about piano pedagogue Ilonka Deckers-Kuszler who extensively taught, in her studio located in Milan...

The 45th episode of Dress Rehearsal, on 107.3 KBFG Seattle, welcomes Composer Jack Van Zandt who is a Los Angeles and Ireland-based composer of music for concerts, public spaces, gallery installations, television, film, and advertising. He has composed more than 300 works and his concert music has been performed in the USA, Canada, Asia and Europe. He is a co-Grammy winner in the Best Classical Co...

The 44th episode of "Dress Rehearsal" features Brahms' Third Piano Concerto. But, didn't Brahms only compose two piano concertos? Yes he did, in fact the Third is an arrangement of Brahms's Violin Concerto done by Croatian Pianist Dejan Lazic, who spent six years transcribing and adapting for the piano a work written for the violin. The practice of adapting a concerto for violin for a keyboard ins...

The 43rd episode of Dress Rehearsal, on 107.3 KBFG Seattle, welcomed Italian Critic Luca Chierici, who has dedicated his life to studying the pianistic literature and follow the development of pianism throughout the years. Sometime in the seventies he began attending concerts of the great pianists and record them with portable equipment, thus building a collection of over 70,000 live recordings. T...