Noel Mewton-Wood

Australian Noel Mewton-Wood was a fantastic mid-century pianist whose career, like this of American virtuoso William Kapell, demonstrated temporary — by coincidence both Mewton-Wood and Kapell died in 1953, at age 31. Mewton-Wood produced his concert debut in Melbourne at age 12, and quickly thereafter caught the interest of Wilhelm Backhaus, on tour at that time in Australia. With Backhaus’ encouragement, Mewton-Wood could happen to be London and research on the Royal Academy of Music, furthermore to spending the summers at Lake Como acquiring personal lessons with Artur Schnabel, whose example produced a deep impression on his playing. Mewton-Wood produced his London debut in 1940, at age group 17, and he shortly fell along with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, and Michael Tippett. At war’s end, Mewton-Wood provided the globe premiere from the modified edition of Britten’s Piano Concerto and in the postwar years frequently made an appearance in accompaniment to Pears, completing for Britten as the last mentioned attended to various other duties. With Pears, Mewton-Wood premiered and produced the initial recordings of Tippett’s melody routine The Heart’s Assurance. Mewton-Wood was respectable in concerto books, and specific in the best Romantic functions — he performed all three Tchaikovsky concertos — aswell as the titanic Piano Concerto, Op. 39, of Ferruccio Busoni. A radio aircheck of Mewton-Wood made out of Thomas Beecham in 1948 may be the first complete recording from the Busoni concerto recognized to survive. Unlike Kapell, who passed away in a airplane crash, Mewton-Wood had taken his own lifestyle. He was despondent within the death of the male friend who acquired succumbed to appendicitis, an unlucky occurrence that Mewton-Wood apparently blamed himself. One has got the impression that is somehow not really the whole tale, but non-etheless his death continues to be shrouded in secret. Mewton-Wood recorded extremely extensively for somebody so temporary; his first records were manufactured in accompaniment to violinist Ida Haendel in 1941 as well as the last in 1953 associated violinist Potential Rostal in the Busoni Violin Sonata No. 2, Op. 36b. While Kapell’s documented output continues to be reissued all in a single collection, Mewton-Wood’s continues to be scattered towards the four winds, although ABC Classics in Australia do concern a three-disc gratitude of Mewton-Wood’s result in its Australian History series. Mewton-Wood allegedly also made up prolifically, although very little is well known about his function in this region.