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'Back to Bloch'
SYBIL MICHELOW on
the Importance of being Ernest Bloch
It was with special interest that I attended a recent lunch-hour concert presented last month [18 November 2011] at London's St Martin-in-the-Fields by the Beethoven Piano Society of Europe (Chairman: Professor Malcolm Troup) in conjunction with the International Ernest Bloch Society (of which Professor Troup was appointed chairman earlier in the year). The reason for this joint enterprise was to introduce to London audiences the two laureates of the recent 3rd International Ernest Bloch Music Competition which had attracted more than two hundred applications from forty-five countries with the semi-finals in the new Yehudi Menuhin Concert Hall (in the School bearing his name) and finals at the Britten Theatre in London's Royal College of Music on 14 July 2011. Amongst the judges were soprano Theresa Cahill, violinist Krzysztof Smietana, pianist Daniel Adni, composer Julian Dawes and pianist Malcolm Troup.
On this occasion, the First Prize Winner Ayaka Tanimoto and the Second Prize Winner Lindsay Bryden were partnered at the piano by Malcolm Troup, whose solo performance of the cycle of three pieces constituting Bloch's Poems of the Sea -- 'Waves', Chanty and 'At Sea' -- was most impressive, serving as it did as an interlude between the two prizewinners...
Copyright © 23 December 2011
Sybil Michelow,
London UK
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