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'There is no exquisite beauty,' said Bacon in a subtle definition, 'which has not some strangeness in its proportions.' The playing of Pachmann escapes the insipidity of that beauty which is without strangeness; it has in it something fantastically inhuman, life fiery ice, and it is for this reason that it remains a thing uncapturable, a thing whose secret he himself could never reveal. It is like the secret of the rhythms of Verlaine, and no prosodist will ever tell us why a line like:

can communicate a new shiver to the most languid of the most experienced of nerves. Like the art of Verlaine, the art of Pachmann is one wholly of suggestion; his fingers state nothing, they evoke. I said like the art of Verlaine, because there is a singular likeness between the two methods. But is not all art a suggestion, an evocation, never a statement? Many of the great forces of the present day have set themselves to the task of building up a large, positive art in which everything shall be said with emphasis: the art of Zola, the art of Mr Kipling, in literature; the art of Mr Sargent in painting; the art of Richard Strauss in music. In all these remarkable men there is some small, essential thing lacking; and it is in men like Verlaine, like Whistler, like Pachmann, that we find the small, essential thing, and nothing else.

- Arthur Symons, 'Pachmann and the Piano' from the original edition of Plays, Acting and Music: A Book of Theory (London 1903)

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11th Royal Philharmonic Society Awards

'... a snapshot of the richness and diversity of music making in Britain ...'

Marius Carboni