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

Club Lapel Badge I recently received my membership documents from the GRRC (Goodwood Road Racing Club) and a week or so later the annual luxurious and quite brilliant Goodwood Magazine. Of course it presents a style of life and expenditure that I can only dream of in real terms but this issue was particularly interesting with superbly illustrated articles on the Porsche 911 (50th birthday), William Knight the outstanding Goodwood horse trainer, the racing legend Jimmy Clark, the Boultbee Spitfire Academy where you can train to fly a Spitfire and a celebration of two decades of the Goodwood Festival of Speed. I managed to attend the Goodwood Revival in 2009  in my concours 1949 MG TC (black with Apple-green Collingburn interior)  and am still recovering from the cost from Warsaw of that sublime weekend.     Click on photographs for best results (Leica D-Lux 4) A couple of period punters in...

Just a small sample text from the Edward Cahill biography I am writing  and preoccupied with to the detriment of the rest of my life!  The brilliant, rather dashing, but now forgotten Australian pianist (my great-uncle) was on familiar terms with many of the leading literary, musical and political lights of the day. He performed often for royalty and the aristocracy of the time. There are many postings on this blog concerning him. The whole enterprise is being generously funded in part by a literary grant from the Australia Council, the cultural wing of the Australian Government. His story will be a fine addition to Australian National Biographies. Anthony Andrews as Sir Peter Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel, in the 1982 movie ‘All done in the tying of a cravat’ Sir Percy had declared to his clique of admirers. We seek him here, we seek him there, Those Frenchies seek him everyw...

The noble and fastidious face of  the Polish composer Witold  Lutosławski  25 January 1913 -  7 February 1994  It was during my earliest remarkable encounters with Poland and working in Warsaw in the early 1990s that I first encountered the music of Witold Lutosławski. Already ill with cancer and frail, in his last public performance he conducted his Fourth Symphony at the 1993 Warsaw Autumn Festival. I have never forgotten this profound musical experience.  During this concert I was accelerated back to my rather unusual reverse exposure to classical music. In the 1960s, long before I was at all familiar with the conventional classical repertoire, I had attended concerts, listened to recordings and studied the fascinating 'avant-garde' (so-called at that time) scores of only  living composers such as Pierre Boulez, Henri Pousseur, Iannis Xenakis, Mauricio Kagel, Cornelius Cardew, Krzysztof Penderecki, Luciano B...

In Napoleonic mode at the Castle at Liw, Poland, on the former Lithuanian frontier 1993       1975 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow This great and underestimated touring car was featured in the adventurous cultural and motoring rally around Poland I participated in the summer of 1993. I recounted the saga in one chapter of my book: A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland (Granta, London 2009) The castle of the Dukes of Mazovia dates from 1420 and on the right the small baroque country house (now a museum) was added in 1780. The adjacent water meadows are delightfully picturesque. I have now owned this car for 36 years I n Palmiry Forest near Warsaw, summer pic-nic  2012   1949   MG TC I n more tragic times this forest was the Polish and Jewish killing field for the Nazis just outside Warsaw . Many brilliant Polish and Jewish middle-class professionals, sportsmen, engineers and priests ...