Music Reviews

Young pianists who decide to go into major international competitions will need much more than musicianship from now on.

The young Italian pianist Mauro Bertoli, now based in Ottawa, Canada, displays considerable hubris in leading off his recent solo CD with three well-known Scarlatti sonatas. If he felt he had something to say that Horowitz and Pogorelich hadn’t already said, he was right.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is one of the most arresting of the Romantic period creations but this has not prevented commentators from writing “roaring cataracts of nonsense” about it.  Those choice words from the late English critic and musicologist Donald Tovey came to mind as