December, 2001

New for the page "Yesterday's Concert Pianists"

This month is the tenth anniversary of Felicja Blumental's death, and Annette Celine Mizne from the Blumental Festival sent a notice of special activities for this celebration (see December's Letters to the Editor). She included two links to find out more about these activities: http://www.blumental-festival.org
and http://www.classicaldiscoveries.com.

New for the page "Today's Top Concert Pianists"

In November two new artists were added to this page:
Tessa Birnie (b. New Zealand, July 19, 1934) is a concert pianist who studied with Karl Schnabel, toured Europe in the 1950's and has been active as a pianist and conducter in Sydney, Australia for many years. She has been included in the Baker's and Grove's music encyclopedias, as well as the 1997/98 Who's Who in International Music. Several of her CD's are available, and about three years ago she wrote an autobiography.

Barbara Moser is an active pianist in Austria, as well as throughout Europe and occasionally in the United States.

This past month I updated and added links for several artists already listed on this page. Due to the frequent requests for Alicia de Larrocha's concert schedule I now link her to her North American management at Columbia Artists Management Inc. (CAMI). This page has very little biographical information, which is what I look for in a link, but other pages I have linked to in past months are no longer available.
Another CAMI artist that I now link to her management page is Lilian Kallir

In looking for links to add to existing artists I discovered the personal website of Nina Svetlanova which I greatly enjoyed browsing. This site contains a refreshingly personal glimpse into the making of a career, complete with pictures and links, as well as genuine appreciation and recognition of the master artists that inspired her in the form of three biographical tributes to Grigory Kogan, Heinrich Neuhaus, and Zara Doloukhanova. How many pianists today give so much credit to their artistic roots? This should be required reading for all young artists.

There are two detailed newspaper articles currently on the web about Cipa Dichter. The one I chose to link to is from the Westchester Wag, December 2000, but a more personal glimpse of Cipa is from the Princeton, N.J. Packet Online, July 2000. Both are excellent personal glimpses into how the Dichters balance two professional careers in the same field.

Other new links were added for:
Jane Coop, linking this Canadian pianist to her recordings at Skylark Music.
Ingrid Haebler, who is included in the series, "Great Pianists of the 20th Century", but whose only biography from that series is on a German site (the English summary is at the bottom of the page).
Enid Katahn, linking to a brief faculty page from Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt Univ.
Barbara Nissman, who is listed as one of the "Great Prokofievans" in "The Prokofiev Page"
Etsko Tazaki's personal website,
and Maria Tipo's biographical page in the website of The Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition of Belgium.

New for the page "Other Contemporary Women Pianists"

This month I added a link to Navah Perlman which is a newspaper article from 1997 about her blossoming career and coping with her health problems. I had read this article many months ago and been very impressed with the story, but then it disappeared from the internet for a while. It is now back on and I hope becomes an inspiration to all who read it. Since the article came out Navah's career has increased, both as a chamber player and soloist. Just one more example of the obstacles many people overcome or daily cope with that the casual audience knows nothing about.

In going through CAMI's website I discovered the young pianist Valentina Lisitsa, a rising star on the scene. In the Yahoo pianist website listing I ran across Teresa Walters, whose CD's of Liszt's spiritual music caught my attention.

A new page added to this website is a page of "Links".
Initially I was strongly against having a seperate page of links, since each of the pianist pages can be thought of as a links page, but as time goes on I have been flattered to find that there are several websites that have included "Women at the Piano" in their links page. One of the first, non-reciprocating sites to link here was the University of Washington Music Library "Women in Music" page. That was encouraging because my initial reason-for-being was as an aid to music scholars.