When did I first hear Jorge Bolet?

In 1983, I was in the audience of a masterclass in what was then called the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). The pianist David Wilde was in charge of proceedings. I recall he wore a dark blue double-breasted suit jacket. Born 1935 in Manchester, as a boy he had studied with Solomon and his pupil Franz Reizenstein, who had also studied composition with Hindemith and Vaughan Williams.

Wilde shared with cellist Jacqueline du Pré the honour of opening the BBC's second TV Channel (BBC2) in the north of England with Sir John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra in 1962.

Wilde was Professor of Piano at the Music Academy in Hannover from 1981 to 2000, and since his return to the UK in 2001 has been visiting professor in Keyboard Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

I recall to this day number of things about that masterclass. One young lady played Ginastera's Danzas Argentinas Op.2 and in the slow middle dance, Wilde asked her to play it again with less caution; he wanted a bold sound, of the gauchos etc. He mentioned Artur Schnabel's guiding principle: "Safety last". "Let's hear it again with a few healthy wrong notes!" said Wilde.

Then a student played the Mephisto Waltz. I knew probably nothing about Liszt at that time, and I think I had subscribed to the view that he was all flash and no substance. But I was genuinely beguiled by the music, and especially by Wilde's description of it: violins tuning up, a dance in a village inn, the song of the nightingale (those amazing repeated notes trilling away) etc.

As luck would have it, I had just been reading in Gramophone magazine the review by Max Harrison -which you'll find on this website- about someone called "the legendary Cuban-American pianist". I had never heard of him, though I did vaguely recall a photograph from publicity in 1978 of his Chopin/Godowsky LP, and that still remains one of my favourite photographs of Bolet.

Soon after that masterclass, on a Friday evening, I bought volume one of the new Decca series of Liszt in the HMV shop in Union Street, Glasgow, took it home down to the Ayrshire coast (I was a university student at the time, not studying music) and listened to it; and by the Saturday morning, I was hooked.