ISOLDE TROOST

It is now both officially and meteorologically autumn, and so I can say with one hundred percent accuracy that the new rehearsal season has started. Cue the head cold. But of course. Anyway. New rehearsal season! Most prominently, rehearsals with no less than three fabulous dancers: Florence Rapati, Thami Fisher and Pallas Sridevi, who we have cunningly lured out of retirement yet again... Pallas was actually the one that came up with it – she teaches ballet classes at The Hu

Thirteen pieces were recorded, mixes were made, and as previously stated, the 28th of August 2014 I drove home more tired than I can remember being but with a freshly burned CD of me in my handbag. It didn't quite look the "culmination of several month's worth of effort" part, though. Which, rather unsusprisingly, annoyed me beyond measure. And so, when I woke up Saturday the 30th (Friday having been unanimously voted (by me) as "special extra weekend day") I resolved to do s

Any piece described as "for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study" by the composer is going to be interesting at the very least. And then it turns out that J.S. Bach, the Maestro, the Undisputed First King of the Keyboard himself wrote that, and that's enough said, really. The Well-Tempered Clavier. Every pianist has played a few. They're standard repertoire basically at any time; I pers

Fauré was one of the foremost French composers of his generation. He was actually recognized as such within France at the time, but not so much outside it (except for in the UK), which is pretty notable - it tends to be the other way around! Since, when he was born in 1845, Chopin was still composing and, when he passed away in 1924, the atonal and jazz eras had started, he's often been described as "linking the end of the Romantic era to the beginning of Modernism". His thir

Grieg's Lyric Pieces are perhaps his most well-known. He's written ten books of them, 66 in total, the great majority of them following the popular style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: short, not too complicated character pieces, mostly following an ABA form. He wrote them throughout his entire composing career - so often, that he once put in a letter (to his friend Julius Röntgen) "I have been lyric once again. Can't you please cure me of this affliction

It was about half a year ago that I really realized that the most recent audio recording I had of myself was from 2011; almost three years old. At that time, I had already been toying around with the idea of having a website. However, if I were to get a website, I'd have to put some audio files on it, too, and three year old recordings would simply not suit that purpose. So I set out to find a nice recording studio where I could record at least a few tracks but preferably a b

I met Emma Brown in the first year of my Bachelor's degree in The Hague. I needed a singer to work with for my duo class, so essentially what happened is that I ambushed her in the canteen one afternoon and demanded she work with me. Miraculously, she agreed. Our very first lesson with duo coach Han-Louis Meijer was scheduled three days later, and we, innocent, green and overconfident as we were, decided that about an hour's worth of rehearsal was quite enough. We left Han-Lo

It was supposed to be a relatively "easy" performance. I've known Florence Rapati, the Artistic Director and creator of Flow Performing Arts, for quite some time. Therefore, although we hadn't really worked together as performers before this point, when she asked me to play some pieces as live accompaniment to three choreographies of hers, I agreed without hesitation. It was to be Beethoven's Moonlight sonata, first movement, Phillip Glass' second Metamorphosis, and Saint-Saë

It's quite an interesting experience to see a newspaper article about yourself that you can't read. However, I know what it says (or rather, what it's supposed to say), so understanding it is less of an issue. The violinist Elisabeth St-Cyr, who is as brilliant as she is beautiful, arranged for a concert in Kangasniemi, Finland, and since I was her full-time accompanist at the time, I rather predictably accompanied her. Our programme consisted of French and French-Canadian re

Gaspard de la Nuit is one of the milestones within piano literature. When Ravel dreamed it up in 1909, he specifically set out to compose something more difficult from Balakirew's still-notorious Islamey. The result of that endeavour consists of three pieces, based on three poems from the French poet Aloysius Bertrand's 52 poem cycle "Gaspard de la Nuit". Ondine, the first in the trilogy, is the story of a water nymph, attempting to seduce a mortal man to come to her realm. S