![]() ![]() Afterwards I said to him, ‘I’ve got to work with you or I’ll die,’ and he said ‘Well don’t die, why don’t you come to me in Vienna? 'It happened that Brendel was coming to give a concert at the Austrian Institute and I went to hear him play Chopin and Schubert. I heard the Second and thought instantly, ‘I have got to find a way of working with this man.’ I must have been 19 – I’d finished the conservatoire, I’d played to people including Rubinstein, and I needed another spell of being with a teacher and being closely overseen. Six of the best string quartets about life and deathīecause my father was a critic he was sent new recordings to review every month, and one day he received some of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies by a fellow called Alfred Brendel.Lost movement of a Beethoven string quartet reconstructed.132 in A minor, ‘Heilige dankgesang’, played by the Amadeus Quartet, which really hit me amidships. That’s where I discovered the Beethoven String Quartets, particularly the slow movement of Op. When meals were finished for the day I took it out of the cupboard and listened to whatever I could. As well as an upright piano in my small room there was a wind-up gramophone with a stack of LPs in the dining room. 'Next, we jump forward to my years studying in Paris, from 12 to 18, when I lived in a hostel for girls training to be engineers, run by nuns. I doggedly stuck with it and here I am after all these years. My older siblings played instruments but they all gave it up after a while, particularly when I nailed my colours to the mast. 'It may have been around then, as I was clambering on the piano stool and playing tunes with one finger, that I decided to be a pianist. For some reason the Evening Standard photographer was there and there’s a photo in the family album of me with big round cheeks, wearing a polka-dot taffeta dress, standing smiling on the steps up to the Crush Bar. ![]() I don’t know who sang it then (this was the early ’50s), but if I had to choose a recording I would go for Maria Callas. One of the things I most remember was the aria ‘Caro nome’. ![]() 'At the age of three I was taken to Covent Garden to see Rigoletto, which was a slightly bloodthirsty choice for a three-year-old! I wasn’t scared but it did open dark rich vistas and above all there was this unbelievable music. ![]()
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