Nicola Kos and Danijel Gašparović open the fourth Denia International Piano Festival with works by Beethoven, Papanopulo, Moszkowski and Ravel

 

Last night Nicola Kos and Danijel Gašparović opened the Denia International Piano Festival with a concert of music for four hands. The Croatian pianists included in their varied programme a piece by Boris Papandopulolo, the giant of twentieth century Croatian musical life, whose music remains almost unknown to Western European audiences, despite his having published over four hundred works during a lifetime of music making.

Papandopulo’s compositional style started with Croatian folk music, but he was from the start a sophisticated, eclectic composer, who could draw on many of the styles of European music. As he got older, his music became more dissonant, and he even sought in influence from jazz. Nicola Kos and Danijel Gašparović included the folk inspired but highly complex and rhythmic Dance Suite by Papandopulo.

Each of the suite’s four movements drew spontaneous applause from the Denia audience who, over the years, has shown itself to be open to the exploration of the music of lesser-known composers. On this occasion, the often fiery rhythms, and broken harmonies of these dancers provided excitement in what was eventually essentially a celebration of folk tradition in the hands of a sophisticated composer.

The concert opened with Beethoven’s Opus 6, his Piano Sonata for Four Hands. This is a short work in two movements with light, playful, dance like motives, which were a perfect contrast with the intensely rhythmic twentieth century dances that followed.

In a second half on a Spanish theme, we heard Moskovsky Spanish Dancers Opus12 and then the enigmatic Rhapsodie Españole of Ravel. This latter piece is more often heard in its orchestral version, but at the heart of the work there is a habanera which was originally composed in 1895 for two pianos but was never published separately. In 1907 Ravel composed three other pieces to accompany it and so today the Rhapsodie Españole is a four-movement piece which contains much quiet and reflective music, especially in the first two movements. As ever, with Ravel, it says much about its composer, less about its inspiration.

Nicola Kos and Danijel Gašparović finished with an encore of Dvořak’s Slavonic Dance Opus72 No2 whose gentle, swaying rhythm brought the evening to a close. The next concert in the Denia International Piano Festival is on 8 October and features French pianist Mathis Cathignol in works by Granados, Fauré and Chopin.

Programa de 19 sep 2026 Denia International Piano Festival - Duo Kos-Gasparovic

 

Ars Alta announces the fourth Denia International Piano Festival - 19 Sept to 3 Dec 2026

 

Piano Duo Kos–Gašparović invites you to experience music at its highest level, where two exceptional artists perform with remarkable unity, virtuosity, and expressive power. Their concerts transcend the traditional recital, transforming the piano into an orchestra and every stage into a destination.

From the elegance of Beethoven to the vibrant rhythms of Spain and the evocative colours of Ravel, each program is thoughtfully crafted to inspire, captivate, and leave a lasting impression.

Whether in the world’s leading concert halls, prestigious festivals, or intimate chamber music venues, Piano Duo Kos–Gašparović offers performances that celebrate excellence, passion, and the joy of musical discovery.

Mathis Cathignol (France, 2000) is one of the most promising pianists of his generation. A graduate of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP), he earned Master’s degrees in both Piano Performance and Piano Accompaniment with the highest distinction. A prizewinner at numerous international competitions, he won First Prize at the Pierre Barbizet International Piano Competition (2024) and Third Prize at the Épinal International Piano Competition (2025).

As a soloist, he has performed concertos by Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Ravel, and Stravinsky with leading orchestras, and has appeared at prestigious venues and festivals including La Roque-d’Anthéron, Salle Cortot, and Nohant. Since 2022, he has been Professor of Piano at the Claude Debussy Conservatory in Paris. Praised for the elegance of his sound and the maturity of his interpretations, Mathis Cathignol is rapidly establishing himself as one of the leading young French pianists.

Principal clarinet of the Teatro alla Scala Orchestra and Philharmonic Orchestra since 1984, Fabrizio Meloni completed his musical studies at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan. He is a winner of national and international competitions and has collaborated with internationally renowned soloists such as Bruno Canino, Alexander Lonquich, Michele Campanella, Heinrich Schiff, Friederich Gulda, Editha Gruberova, the Hagen Quartet, M.W. Chung, Philip Moll, Riccardo Muti, and Daniel Baremboim (the latter in his extraordinary capacity as pianist).

He has toured the United States and Israel with the Quintetto a Fiati Italiano. With the Nuovo Quintetto Italiano ha has toured South America and South Asia.. He has been invited to give masterclasses throughout the world. 

Defined by The New York Times “an artist with supreme technical mastery, dazzling and charming with his highly cultivated sound”, Alberto Nosè is one of the most awarded piano artists of his generation. He stood out the international music world at the age of eleven winning 1st Prize at the Jugend für Mozart International Competition in Salzburg. Top prize winner of Montecarlo Piano Masters, New York Concert Artists, Paloma O’Sheain Santander, Long-Thibaud in Paris, Maj Lind in Helsinki, Busoni in Bolzano, he was laureate at the F. Chopin International Piano Competition in 2000 which led him to a worldwide career as soloist as well as with major orchestras (London Philharmonic Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonique de Radio France, Sinfonica de Madrid) in the most renowed concert venues like Carnegie Hall in New York, Southbank Centre in London, Konzerhaus in Berlin, Théâtre du Châtelet and Salle Pleyel in Paris, Auditorium in Madrid, Mozarteum in Salzburg, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, City Hall in Hong Kong, Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, La Fenice in Venice, Santa Cecilia in Rome.

His debut album for Piano Le Magazine featuring works by Brahms, Chopin, Liszt and Prokofiev won several awards like CHOC du Monde de la Musique and La Clef by ResMusica. His CD of the Keyboard Sonatas by J. Ch. Bach, recorded on modern piano and published by Naxos, has been broadcast by Radio France, BBC 3, Radio 4 Netherland, Radio New Zealand, ABC Classic FM USA and Australia.

István I. Székely is an internationally acclaimed concert pianist, pedagogue, and distinguished representative of the Franz Liszt pianistic tradition. He is Professor of Piano at the Katarina Gurska Conservatory in Madrid and at the Franz Liszt Center for High Performance Pianists in La Nucía, Spain.

He has given masterclasses in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Turkey, Israel, Colombia, and Spain, and is regularly invited to serve on the juries of prestigious international piano competitions. As a concert pianist, he has performed throughout Spain, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Greece, Russia, Turkey, the United States, and Colombia, and has had the honor of giving a private recital for Her Royal Highness Princess Chulabhorn Mahidol of Thailand.

He is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Dénia International Piano Festival, the Alicante International Piano Competition, and the Franz Liszt Center Piano Competition, as well as the Founder and Music Director of the Sombor Philharmonic. His artistic and pedagogical career reflects a lifelong commitment to musical excellence and the preservation of the great European piano tradition.

Programme and booking details are at https://www.arsaltacultural.com/eng/ and https://www.arsaltacultural.com/

This Side Of Paradise is a very famous novel and justly so. Its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, has been something of a blind spot for me. I read The Great Gatsby as a teenager and, frankly, was disappointed. The reaction says more about me and my age than about the book. But that was many years ago and perhaps I should revisit it.

But This Side Of Paradise was the author’s first novel and first success. It did take him many years and much revision to complete and, frankly, it shows. The style, point of view and indeed characterisation is, for me, inconsistent throughout. And what is more the mixture of forms – narrative, description and poetry, also for me, seems to flow from the writer’s need to impress and explore rather than any desire to communicate. At the same time, it feels like the writer also does not want to experiment.

Amory Blaine, the principal character, is a Midwesterner who finds himself in a private school and then Princeton. At the outset, he appears to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth as he sets about building career, love, family, and future. But life does not work out that way for him. He is repeatedly unlucky in love, finding that the women he falls for have better, far more lucrative options. His fortune, apparently considerable at the start, dwindles, until at the end of the book he is a poor man, but returning to Princeton, no doubt to pursue the academe that he had earlier apparently turned his back on.

Amory Blaine does spend time in the trenches in World War I, but he is decidedly reticent about the experience. We have no clues as to whether this is born of trauma or indifference. Perhaps the author, himself, had no direct resource to rely on since his own time in the military was spent within the USA. At the end of the novel, amid disagreements about politics, he does mention one acquaintance who was killed in the fighting, but the loss of life in the trenches, and also from the influenza epidemic that followed apparently past him by or perhaps left no lasting impression. One feels that the events that cause Amory Blaine to rethink his life and pursue different directions were precisely those that beset the writer himself.

In the first half of the book, I felt a little frustrated about the characters, who seemed to have no depth. In effect, they all seem to live in an eternal present, hardly ever referring to their collective past or harbouring ambitions or fears about the future. What emerges is a desire to conform to the ideals of the social class that they imagine they adhere to, more specifically the social class to which they aspire. If they are successful in forming facilitating liaisons, that class identity is reinforced, if not, it is questioned. Amory increasingly finds himself in the latter position, leading him inexorably towards socialism. One feels that he would not have espoused these views if he had married money, as he originally set out to do.

Amory Blaine and several of his acquaintances are heavily into literature and regularly quote and write poetry, but the efforts are late nineteenth century in style. There is no obvious modernism here. They, and the writer, are drawn towards epithets which, though in context impress, seems overdone, overwritten. Here are just two examples. Wandering through a storm one day, Amory asks himself: ‘“Who the devil is there in Ramilly County,” muttered Amory aloud, “who would deliver Verlaine in an extemporaneous tune to a soaking haystack?”’ Soon after a character muses: ‘Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April.’

By the end of the book, Amory declares himself a socialist, but his radicalism is couched in democratic terms, not in revolutionary and his position seems to be born of rejection by the social class he once aspired to, rather than a plea for justice in human relations. But This Side Of Paradise remains a masterpiece of its kind, a towering achievement of a young writer and is well worth reading.

Writers and their work - David Storey by John Russell Taylor

 

A difficulty with writing a critical assessment of the work of a living writer is that an author has to gamble with time. John Tussell Taylor’s monograph was published in 1974 and so concentrated on David Storey’s output in the 1960s and the early 1970s. The problem for John Russell Taylor’s work was that David Storey published in 1976 his novel Saville, which won the Booker prize that year. Now Saville is without question a towering achievement. Reading the book, as I have done several times, it almost feels like a biography of me and the hundreds of other people from industrial, northern England whose lives were quite transformed by the 1944 Education Act. For the first time access to education was both wider and more available. My own father, no doubt academically gifted, had to leave a local grammar school before doing any public qualifications simply because his parents could not afford to have him remain as a non-earner. When I entered the same school a generation later, I was automatically assigned to the same “house” into which my father had been ascribed. Saville thus described what it felt like to be socially mobile in the 1950s and 1960s, to be separated from one’s roots, to learn to speak the same language a different way, and to feel a growing sense of alienation from one’s own background. The roots were perhaps illusory throughout, as the economic and social changes of the nineteen eighties illustrated.

What John Russell Taylor does describe so well in his monograph are the David Storey works that preceded Saville. These were already a significant literary achievement. The novelist-playwright burst onto the British literary scene with hi novel This Sporting Life. It features a rugby league player called Arthur Machin in the book and renamed Frank in Lindsay Anderson’s film. As a player, he is well known locally and moderately successful, at least when he walked the streets of his local town. When a widow makes herself available to him – for whatever reason - he enters a relationship with her. There follows an examination of misogyny, sexism, social class and identity as the local hero falls from grace and has to accept failure. These are very much the threads that John Russell Taylor examines Storey’s existing work including Flight to Camden, Passmore, The Restoration of Arthur Middleton and others.

John Russell Taylor writes at the conclusion of his work: “If in his lack of reticence, his acceptance of openly expressed violence and passion as part of life and therefore, without embarrassment, as part of literature Storey seems like a maverick figure in the British literary scene, the impression is superficial. He can be seen as our first truly modern novelist because for him the traditional obstacles thrown up by middle-class education and the gentlemanly tradition of understatement are not consciously overcome; they quite simply do not exist.” This is a telling conclusion. It provides anyone with little knowledge of the circumstances in which David Story wrote a clear pointer as to how to approach his work. Access to education, the social changes that started post Word War II and the continuous rise of material prosperity really did change British society. Older values seemed to be sept aside. It also created a confusion of identity which persists, because though working-class people were admitted to and thereby created different social strata, they were never allowed to own their own identity.

As a footnote, I offer something that is unrelated to the book I am reviewing. I personally appear in the Film of This Sporting Life. In the big crowd scene filmed at Wakefield Trinity’s Belle Vue ground, I am the nine-year-old that appears for a split second behind the sticks at the scoreboard end. I was one of 28000 people who turned up to watch Wakefield beat Wigan on the way to Wembley. The score was 5-4. Fred Smith scored the try. The memory is still vivid. Also vivid was the way the crowd reacted with laughter at Richard Harris’s inability to catch the ball and number of retakes Anderson had to shoot as a result. But we were extras. The real interests were on the pitch, part of the filming. The extras are still there.

3 TV Plays by David Mercer

 

In 3 TV Plays David Mercer published the scripts of A Suitable Case For Treatment, For Tea On Sunday and And Did Those Feet. All were produced and broadcast in 1966 or before, and each one was directed by Don Taylor at the BBC. I probably watched all three plays when they were originally broadcast, no doubt accompanied by my parents initially remarking on the playwright’s origins in nearby Wakefield and then dissolving into “I don’t know why they put out this rubbish on the telly.”

But David Mercer did make an impression on me, especially the later plays On The Eve Of Publication and Let’s Murder Vivaldi, when perhaps I was more able to appreciate their subtlety. But this later work was much more conventional than these earlier plays. 

David Mercer had made his name as a playwright specifically on television, rather than the theatre. His early Where The Difference Begins had explored family relations in a working-class household in which both sons had been educated out of the class and had adopted markedly different lifestyles and politics from their father.

The plays in 3 TV plays, however, find David Mercer in a much more surreal guise, flirting, if that’s the right word, with absurdity. The reaction of my parents was apparently shared by the head of drama of the BBC when Don Taylor, the director, likened Mercer’s work to Ionesco. “Ian who?” was the reply.

A Suitable Case For Treatment is a study in marital breakdown, a situation that Mercer had himself gone through some years before. The play is darkly satirical. Morgan, the principal character, frequently has visions of hammers and sickles, and gorillas, which emphasize the unpredictability of behaviour that clearly led to the breakdown of his relationships. The TV play which reflected this darkness was wiped. The 1960s film of the same script ignores the theme to become a mere frothy comedy.

In For Tea On Sunday, three couples meet to share a gentle social occasion. Unfortunately for five of them, the sixth is what would have been labelled at the time as a “mental case”. He shows up to a London flat with an axe and breaks the place apart. The reactions of the other characters to this show of absurdity is what the play is really about.

In these two plays Mercer presents a character that does not follow conventions of behaviour. It might be argued that the author portrays himself and his personality type. In these plays, he wanted to explore what the reactions of others might be if this tendency was taken to extreme. One is reminded of his first meeting with Don Taylor where Mercer claimed he poured a cup of coffee on the carpet.

And Did Those Feet explores wildly different territory. Unlike the other two plays, the original production survives and is available on the internet. I would encourage everyone to watch it, bearing in mind that this was broadcast midweek at primetime.

And Did Those Feet is a quotation from Blake’s Jerusalem, which, in a setting by Hubert Parry, still features at the last night of the proms. For the general populace, this is a symbol of the establishment, that wall of landed gentry and their professional allies that keeps the hoi-polloi out.

A member of the landed gentry is obsessed with succession. He cannot, however, sire anything but bastards, the twins, Bernard and Timothy, who, though opposites, become inseparable. There are references to Jules et Jim, the apparent uselessness of the upper classes and their hoarding of capital. Their mother goes to live with an artist in Chelsea, who keeps her in a cage, a situation she seems to be quite happy with. In an obvious skit towards the director, a character opines that working class people send their kids to Oxford.

In And Did Those Feet, Mercer approached the surreal. Who cares what it means? There is no plot, incidentally. There is a rubbishing of the upper-class contribution to the war effort by depicting the twins lazing around in Burma. There is a swimming pool sequence where the twins swing on trapezes by candlelight. Reference to Chekov comes when they try to unsuccessfully to shoot themselves. Their father gifts them each a female doll in a coffin. The two bastards then inherit everything and go canoeing on a tributary of the Amazon. Watch it. It was of its time, but who would do something like that now?

 

Days of Vision : working with David Mercer : television drama then and now 1990 by Don Taylor

Coming from Wakefield, I have a particular interest in the work of playwright David Mercer. So it was with some excitement that I started Don Taylor’s memoir Days of Vision: working with David Mercer. In the book, Don Taylor, who directed–produced David Mercer's work for television in the early 1960s, offers far more than biography, far more than a description of a professional relationship that had the potential to change the direction that television drama might take.

Don Taylor describes his own history which took him from working class origins in West London to Oxford, and then to the BBC as a trainee. He also vividly remembers how television drama was created in those days of boom microphones and heavy cameras on wheels. It is revelatory to a twenty-first century reader to realize that many of the programmes had to be done live in the studio, because recording meant film and film meant location, and location meant expense. Anyone remotely interested in how television is made will be captivated by the author’s description of 1960s practice.

Don Taylor describes in detail a professional relationship that lasted just three years with David Mercer. What scuppered that relationship was a change within the BBC, itself, which changed the focus of television drama and effectively shut Don Taylor out of making further contributions to the medium in the way that Taylor wanted.

Mercer was himself working class, but northerner. He was different from Don Talor in that he had not been to Oxford or indeed any other prestigious university and had already been married and divorced. Both socialists, disillusioned by the 1960s, Don and David shared a political as well as a social bond. Both had been brought up by working class parents who neither appreciated nor understood either “writing” or the “theatre”.

One of the early collaborations that writer and director focused on was the play Where The Difference Begins with its themes of the death of old-style socialism, and being educated out of your class. The play eventually became the first part of Mercer’s Generations trilogy, all of which Don Taylor directed.

Quotations from Taylor about working with Mercer are jewels in the text. He says that “David Mercer’s best TV plays seem to me to rub shoulders with the best English theatre writing since the war.” The playwright’s “A Death in the Family had… an intellectual acuity about politics and political issues as they expressed themselves in conflicts between recognizable human people, that was quite new to me.” Furthermore “Mercer had … an intellectual grasp more characteristic of a European writer, a Sartre, or a Camus, or a Brecht, than any English contemporary” and that “he perceived that human beings. … have a sense of their own reality. … (Mercer’s characters) are what they believe.” He believed that “David Mercer wasn’t merely a talented new voice. He was a voice that was much needed if we were to wake up to any understanding of what kind of people we were.”

Mercer the “cuddly teddy-bear” is also here, as is his heavy drinking and his womanising. There is a priceless episode that happened at their first meeting. Unused to the middle-class flat in which Don Taylor and his wife hosted him, Mercer spilt his coffee on the carpet. Mercer later claimed he had done it on purpose.

But this professional biography is much more than a history of a collaboration. Don Taylor describes his own fall from grace in the BBC without any of the bitterness that a reader of this text will assume existed. What Taylor does do is end the book with a treatise on just how wrong the executives’ vision of television’s future had become. Writing at the end of the 1980s, Don Taylor thought that commercialism and the “low-brow” had come to dominate. One can only imagine what he would have made of the twenty-first century content-free medium, where even major sports events have to be disrupted so that advertisement can get their pounds of flesh.

As a coda to the review of Don Taylor’s Days of Vision, I set AI the task of summarizing David Reisman’s version views on US popular culture. It came up with the following: David Riesman’s view of U.S. popular culture was ambivalent rather than simply hostile. In The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman argued that modern American society was shifting from “inner-directed” people, guided by internalised family and moral standards, toward “other-directed” people, guided by peers, approval, fashion, and mass media.

For Riesman, U.S. pop culture—films, radio, magazines, advertising, children’s stories, and later television—was not just entertainment. It acted as a social tutor, teaching people how to behave, what to desire, how to fit in, and how to read the expectations of others. This made popular culture central to the formation of the modern American personality.

He worried that mass culture could encourage conformity, status anxiety, consumerism, and a dependence on social approval: the “other-directed” person wants to be liked and accepted rather than guided by firm inner convictions.

But Riesman was not simply an elitist critic of popular culture. He also saw that mass culture could widen horizons, spread information, create shared references, and give people models for imagining different lives. That helps explain why his introduction to Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society matters: U.S. popular culture could be seen as part of modernization, exposing people in traditional societies to new lifestyles, aspirations, and forms of social mobility.

In short: Riesman saw American pop culture as a powerful engine of modernization and social learning, but also as a force that could produce shallow conformity and dependence on mass-mediated approval.

In the final section of his book, Don Taylor offers a similar analysis of what happened to television. Riesman’s position very much sums up what the author thought. US popular culture was perhaps the diametric opposite of what Don Taylor wanted to achieve in his work. It is perhaps indicative of the victory of commercialism that now Don Taylor’s and David Mercer’s work is confined to obscurity, but the aesthetic achievement is still available to experience at least in part, though most of the collaborative ventures they produced were wiped years ago.