Classical Music in Poland and the Europe of Chopin - From the Reviewer's Notebook

  Click on to enlarge  Christopher Balfour's Bristol 400 in Davos Switzerland in the 1960s 'BRISTOL BEACH' If any of my readers share my passion for classic cars (rare enough I think) and Bristols in particular do click on something I wrote about my brief one year experience of owning one of these great machines while at university in Sydney Australia in 1966. I came across this amusing and terribly nostalgic essay concerning my youth quite by chance.   Click on: https://app.box.com/s/p07vebizqwvs79etcqnyc1exhv086ydo This link is to the story now on a cloud, originally on a website set up by the peerless Ashley James in the UK who restored a Bristol 400 to perfection.  His brilliant technical and advice website concerning his long history and restoration of the magnificent Bentley Mk VI model, his restoration of  an Austin-Healey Mk III and many fascinating articles from fellow enthusiasts are also available. Well worth reading whatever classi

I spent a particulary busy Christmas break researching the Indian and Far Eastern concert tour 1919-1921 of the pianist Edward Cahill accompanied by the tenor George Brooke and writing that chapter of his extraordinary life. The Queensland floods may necessarily postpone my trip to Australia for that section of the book until later in the year. The deadline I have been given may need to be extended as I rearrange matters. At all events here is an extract from the completed Chapter 3 of the new book. First a few initial reflections on Liszt. I hope to go to Weimar again this year to see the Liszt house (which will have been fully restored by now) and investigate more fully his years spent teaching in that extraordinary and beautiful small town. This remarkable place had an incalculable effect on the now cruelly and tragically abandoned ideals of eighteenth century Enlightenment thought in Europe. Both Goethe and Schiller lived and wrote there and visiting their respective ho