Global Fascinations and Sophistications

Sam Haywood

I have got to know Sam Haywood rather well since I first heard him play for the Chopin Society and talked to him at length after a working day at the Royal Academy of Music, London. Sam's playing - always supremely confident and intensely musical - has grown enormously in stature over the past ten years and apart from recitals and concerts at wide spread venues and stately homes, he is making a real international career for himself at a considerable pace.

Self-critical, he selects key works to perform at events, then restructures his thinking and approach to play them differently next time round. He is very much the creative artist and loves to involve himself with other performers to cross-section ideas. Above all, he matches his own charm and daring to works he programmes - roughly from Bach to the late Romantics, which also takes into account select 20th century repertoire. Liszt's B minor Sonata has always been a passionate challenge to his vividness of imagination. Here on CD is his 1997 account, along with a composer's work which the Hungarian composer always admired - Schubert - in the first set of Impromptus, with Liszt's transcriptions of two songs: Auf dem Wasser zu singen and the haunting Gretchen am Spinnrade.

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