© AI Training forbidden - Selected Classical Music in the Poland of Chopin - Reviewer's Notebook

I have neglected this blog terribly but I am overwhelmed with reading, researching and writing my work on the increasingly remarkable story of the Australian pianist Edward Cahill. I have also neglected my own piano and harpsichord practice which is worse. I manage to get to the gym three or four times a week but maintaining  mens sana in copore sano is so time consuming but vital. I came across this clipping from a London newspaper published sometime in 1925 (precise date missing). The Chappell concert grand piano was a highly respected English instrument of the period and the company arranged a series of concerts with famous pianists in popular venues using their instruments. Edward Cahill was one of the chosen pianists. Certainly he kept company with some of the finest pianists of the period and it says a great deal about his remarkable playing. For me it confirms once more the importance of this lost and forgotten talent and his remarkable life history....

  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...

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...

Watercolour and pencil drawing of Chopin on his death bed by Kwiatkowski. The painter was a witness to his last hours and death and drew a number of likenesses I receive the most interesting correspondence on Chopin from many people distinguished in their fields. I would like to share the latest with you from Professor Wilfred Niels Arnold Ph.D. who is Professor of Biochemistry at Kansas University Medical Center, Kansas City. The fact he is another Australian from Queensland makes this 'leak'  all the more pleasurable. As the Chopin Year draws to a close it is a strangely fitting modern scientific reflection on the shuffling off of the composer's 'mortal coil' and the beginning of his musical immortality. We all know Chopin died of tuberculosis. I have always been interested in the more detailed conclusions of modern medical science on the deaths of great artists of the past. Professor Arnold has carried out extensive research on C...

 The brilliant but now forgotten Australian concert pianist Edward Cahill (1885-1975)  Edward Cahill seated in the front row on the left of Princess Alice at a private Mayfair piano recital at the home of the Dowager Lady Swathling 1934 (click to enlarge) A few of Edward Cahill's ('Uncle Eddie') private recordings of Chopin made in 1935 miraculously survived his glamorous career of travel and royal engagements. They also somehow survived a disastrous fire at his home in 1932. I have recently had them all sensitively re-mastered by Selene records in Poland who specialise in this type of thing for all the great Polish Chopin pianists of the past - Michalowski, Koczalski, Turczynski, Zurawlew..... You will realise on hearing these remarkable interpretations that Cahill lies on the cusp of the the great nineteenth century Chopin pianistic 'individualistic' tradition of de Pachmann, Friedman, Lehvinne, Godowsky and Rosenthal and the advent of th...