Great Pianists Speak for Themselves

I was browsing the books in the basement when I saw a gem I bought at U of T years ago for $3.99:  Great Pianists Speak for Themselves Volume 2 by Elyse Mach.

I think I had borrowed volume 1 from the library when I lived in Calgary (and worked at the downtown branch for minimum wage).  I found it very interesting reading.  A few of my favorites are missing though:  Maurizio Pollini and Krystian Zimerman stand out for me.  However, in this volume, Murray Perahia, Zoltán Kocsis and Leon Fleisher were featured.  I happened to find a the Dover reprint of both volumes called Great Contemporary Pianists Speak for Themselve on Amazon.ca and it arrived last Friday along with the BBC Rigoletto DVD. They lowered the price on me by about $4!  DARN.  I hope my kids read it sometime.  I think I like the pianists in volume 2 more than volume 1 (although Claudio Arrau and Alfred Brendel are artists I like too).  It's interesting to read Kocsis discovered as a teenager he had no piano technique!  I've been listening a lot to his DVD of Beethoven Opus 111 while exercising and just for pure enjoyment.  I'm now listening to another gem I dug out of the basement--Angela Hewitt's CBC disk of Bach piano concertos with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra recorded 25 years ago!

Argh!  Windows 8 Pro is giving problems on my AMD 6 core.  For some reason, I was trying to run Windows Media Player - it wouldn't start.  I checked the shortcut and saw it pointed to the 64-bit version.  I tried the 32-bit version and it ran.  Windows 8 may boot fast, but it still takes a while for everything to startup.  It is faster than Windows 7 though (but I've not had the setup for more than a year yet, so who knows?