The Notebook (2004)

Turkish pianist Idil Biret is a fixture of the Naxos catalog and its completist enterprises, having recorded the collected piano works of Chopin and Brahms for the label. Between 1994 and 2008, she recorded a cycle of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas for her own IBA (Idil Biret Archives) label. She has appeared with most of the world's major orchestras and presented recitals in many countries, with a notable high point being a complete performance of Liszt's brutally difficult transcriptions of Beethoven's nine symphonies at the 1986 Montpellier Festival in France. Studio performances of those transcriptions were recorded for EMI and released on the IBA label. Biret was, in short, one of the world's top-rank pianists, not a star whose name was familiar even to casual listeners, but a versatile performer whose capabilities were well known to enthusiasts.

Florence + The Machine today releases her highly-anticipated new album, Dance Fever. The album features previously-released tracks ’My Love’, ‘Free’, ‘King’ and ‘Heaven is Here’.

Rodion Shchedrin's “Carmen Suite” is well-known in the world of theater und of the opera. Its popularity is altogether unique in the history of modern music – but only a small part of his multifaceted oeuvre notable for its unmistakably Russian character and, at the same time, its international aura. A brilliant pianist and organist, Shchedrin has appeared throughout the entire world as a successful performer of his own works.

Shchedrin was born in Moscow into a musical family—his father was a composer and teacher of music theory. He studied at the Moscow Choral School and Moscow Conservatory (graduating in 1955) under Yuri Shaporin (composition) and Yakov Flier (piano). He was married to the well-known ballerina Maya Plisetskaya from 1958 until her death in 2015.

It’s impossible to imagine a musical training without Bach, from children’s music academies to conservatories. Bach is here to stay. When I started teaching children in the 1970s, quite a few of my colleagues were making fruitless attempts to (partially) replace Bach with Bartók’s Mikrokosmos. The children, however, had very little if any enthusiasm for Bartók’s music and their teachers eventually had to back down. Bartók, with all due respect, was no match for Bach.