The Secret Magic of Music

Ida Lichter is a psychiatrist based in Sydney, Australia. She has been involved with music for most of her life and studied piano performance and theory before taking up a career in medicine, specializing in psychiatry. An interest in performance anxiety led her to work in the field of therapy for musicians who were trying to master symptoms inhibiting their ability to play in public. For many years she lived in London, and together with her family, was intimately involved with Wigmore Hall, one of the world’s leading venues for the performance of chamber music. She is a founder and director of Music In The Hunter chamber music festival, inaugurated in 1991 to commemorate the bicentenary of Mozart’s death. It takes place in the Hunter Valley wine-growing district of New South Wales, Australia, and celebrated its twentyfourth successful year in 2014. Members of the Goldner String Quartet, who are the core performers, have played at every festival, togethe Evgeny Kissin was born in Moscow in October 1971 and began to play by ear and improvise on the piano at the age of two. At six years old, he entered a special school for gifted children, the Moscow Gnessin School of Music, where he was a student of Anna Pavlovna Kantor, who has remained his only teacher. At the age of ten, he made his concerto debut playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 466 and gave his first solo recital in Moscow one year later. He came to international attention in March 1984 when, at the age of twelve, he performed Chopin’s Piano Concertos 1 and 2 in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory with the Moscow State Philharmonic under Dmitri Kitaenko. This concert was recorded live by Melodia, and a two-LP album was released the following year. During the next two years, several Kissin performances in Moscow were recorded live and five more LPs were released by Melodia. Kissin’s first appearances outside Russia were in 1985 in Eastern Europe,