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Discovery Records
specialist music - mail order |
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Nick van Bloss was born in London and began piano lessons at the age of 11. His musical training began as a chorister at Westminster Abbey and he entered the Royal College of Music at the age of 15 as a Junior, attending full time from the age of 17, studying with Yonty Solomon and winning prizes for hisplaying. Further studies were with Benjamin Kaplan.
In 1994, aged 26, Nick van Bloss played a televised recital in Poland at the Chopin Festival. This proved to be his last public appearance before he retired from playing completely for 15 years. During these years van Bloss rarely touched a piano, but he did write his autobiographical memoir ‘Busy Body’, which was published, to much acclaim, in 2006. The following year he was the subject of a BBC ‘Horizon’ documentary exploring his creativity. Thisdocumentary led to interest in his piano playing and, in 2008, he began a series of recordings with award winning producer Michael Haas, including a recording of Bach’s Keyboard Concertos with the English Chamber Orchestra.
This recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations marks van Bloss’s first venture back into professional life since his retirement. Of his playing, Michael Haassays that “in polyphonic music, such as Bach, Nick offers a superhuman degree of precision and individuality with each voice, while never losing overall transparency,” and who feels that van Bloss’s Chopin and Rachmaninov are characterised by a “crystalline solidity” which enables him to build and shape works with total security and “achieve a near perfect balance between vibrancy of keyboard playing and sweep of musical vision.”
In April 2009, van Bloss made a ‘comeback’ concert at London’s Cadogan Hall, playing a concerto by Bach and Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto with the English Chamber Orchestra. The concert, uniformly reviewed as a ‘Triumph’ by London’s critics, attracted massive media interest from all over the world. |
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Discovery catalogue available for
J.S.Bach
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Goldberg Variations - Nick van Bloss
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