A great pianist and friend of ours commented recently that if you don’t understand Bach then you don’t understand music. I actually found this comment to be a bit incorrect, I’m not sure whether John Lennon understood the intricacies of Bach but he was still an amazingly talented musician who wrote some of the world’s best loved songs. However, it is most certainly true that Bach cemented the foundations of modern...

Improvising is something with classical musicians often shy away from and leave solely to the “jazzers”. I find this strange as all of the great composers were also great improvisers, that’s how they came up with all those great musical ideas. Bach was a great improviser on the harpsichord as was the pianist that we will be talking about here, Chopin. The Waltz is something which Chopin loved to improvise and play around...

Moonlight Sonata was composed by Ludwig Van Beethoven in 1801 and to this day is still one of the most popular pieces in the classical piano repertoire. The composition has been played by all of the world’s top pianists with some notable recordings by Evgeny Kissin and Lang Lang. The piece is famous for it’s descending bass part in the introduction (written below)  which is also referred to as a Phrygian Progression. This motif was...