PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

LESLIE HOWARD
© Jason P Tailby
passages in the sessions. (I am afraid that there are some
out-takes which reflect a very wide vocabulary of profanity
under stress.) I must also thank the others involved—
Martin Compton, who produced the early discs, Antony
Howell, who engineered the first one, and Dénes Rédly,
who was of enormous help with the orchestral sessions in
Budapest.
Although the series has been of solo piano music, there
have been a few happy occasions where I have enjoyed the
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collaboration of other artists: the late Geoffrey Parsons,
OBE, played wonderfully in the four-hand Ad nos, ad salutarem
undam (in Vol. 17); Paul Coletti was indispensable
and marvellous in Harold en Italie (Vol. 23); Philip Moore
kindly and skilfully played in Borodin’s Polka and the
Magic Flute duet (Vols. 35, 42); Wolf Kahler, Sandor Eles
and Yuri Stepanov declaimed movingly in the Recitations
(Vol. 41); and the Budapest Symphony Orchestra under
Karl Anton Rickenbacher accompanied with magnificent
enthusiasm in all the concertante works (Vols. 53a, 53b).
None of these records could have been made without
the excellent offices of Steinway & Sons. I thank Philip
Sander, Colin Turner, Geoff Oakley, David Widdicombe,
Nigel Polmear and Robert Padgham for all their help, and
above all I salute the tireless and consummate skill of
Ulrich Gerhartz, who is simply the best of the best. It says
something for the quality of his maintenance of the instruments
that, during the project, I purchased one of the
pianos used in the recordings, and Trygg Tryggvason did
likewise with another.
A special group of people without whom this project
could not have come to fruition are my colleagues at the
Liszt Society, who have copied or lent scores and manuscripts,
or have helped me to obtain them, and who have
never tired of my enthusiastic witterings over every new
discovery, no matter how slight: I think immediately of
Alastair (The Marquess of) Londonderry, Leon Baird,
Alfred Brendel, Matthew Brooks, John Davies, J Audrey
Ellison, the late Keith Fagan, Paul Gregory, Kenneth
Hamilton, Alastair Hardie, Steven Isserlis, Sally Lockerbie,
Arthur Mason, Eunice Mistarz, Edward Morton Jack,
Dudley Newton, G Alan Paul, Iain Quinn, Elgin Ronayne,
Michael Short, Kenneth Souter, Chris de Souza, Adrian
Williams and William Wright. Thank you, all.
Many people in the wider world of musicology, including
curators, librarians and internationally renowned