Sunday, July 23, 2017
For my first trip and concert in Ireland, the Dublin International Piano Festival pulled out all the stops. I started off my wonderful week of piano playing and teaching with the Smackdown. The audience packed the Hugh Lane Gallery, and it was a wonderfully diverse audience by age, with an average age of 40, and a pretty even split within the age brackets. Only the 40-60s skewed for Debussy - the rest went definitively for Prokofiev, hence the overall victory for Prokofiev. This was a surprise for me - I had thought that the beautiful setting, the limpid piano and resonant acoustic would favor Debussy. I’ll now have to rethink my theory about when Debussy wins and when Prokofiev wins! Fun fact: the Irish do not like ties! See more below.
