• ABRSM Piano Exam Pieces 2011 & 2012
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(left: Mr. Bernard King, center: Mr. Stephen Ellis, right: Mr. Paul Arnell; depicted with the New York Representative on the far left)

Bernard King

Bernard King started to play the piano at the age of five and while still at school achieved both the ARCM and the LGSM Performers diplomas, the latter with the silver medal for the highest score in the UK. Subsequently he studied for five years at the Royal Academy of Music with Frederic Jackson and Vivian Langrish winning several prizes and scholarships, including the highest award – the Recital Diploma. On two occasions he was chosen as soloist for the orchestral concerts. A French Government Scholarship and awards from the Countess of Munster Musical Trust enabled him to spend several years in Paris studying with the distinguished pianists Vlado Periemuter and Marcel Ciampi, who had close links with Debussy and Ravel.

Bernard has had a varied musical career and has been active in many spheres of performing and teaching. As pianist and accompanist he has played throughout Europe including London concerts at the Wigmore Hall and South Bank and has also broadcast for the BBC.

Teaching has always been of great importance to him and he has held appointments both at the Royal Academy Junior Department and the Senior Department of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama, where he was Professor of Piano for many years. During his time in Scotland, together with his colleague Elisabeth Jacobs, he founded the Scottish International Piano Competition, now an elected member of the International Federation of Music Competitions. In 1987 he was appointed as Associate of the Royal Academy of Music in recognition of service to the music profession. His teaching has been strongly influenced by the Alexander Technique and he developed a strong interest in the psychological aspects of performing, exploring new ways to help students unlock places of hidden potential within that would allow them to express themselves in a fuller more authentic way. He is also qualified and active professionally as a Psychotherapist.

Paul Arnell

Paul Arnell was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford, where he started learning the violin, viola, piano, and flute. He then went to the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied on the GRSM (Hons) course, concentrating on the viola and piano as his main instruments. During this period, Paul also passed LRAM, ARCM, and LTCL diplomas before going to Homerton College, Cambridge, where he gained a PGCE qualification.

Paul’s first teaching post was as Head of Music in a secondary school, and he has subsequently worked for Music Services in Essex, where he was an Area Manager, and for the London Boroughs of Redbridge and Havering. In 1997 Paul completed an NVQ Level 4 course in Management and was subsequently awarded the East Anglian Regional Student of the Year. His most recent post as Head of Strings for Havering Music School gave Paul the opportunity to conduct a massed string group of eighty young people on stage at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.

The span of Paul’s teaching experience is wide and varied and covers all ages on violin, viola and piano as well as general class music, A-level teaching, orchestral coaching and conducting. He has conducted youth orchestras, string groups, and choirs, and has vast experience in working with Junior String Ensembles. In addition to this, Paul has been Musical Director of Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Groups putting on cabaret-style shows, as well as working with young people in order to musically direct performances of Oliver and Tom Sawyer.

Originally a member of the Essex Youth Orchestra, where he was principal viola, Paul is also the violist in the Westbourne String Quartet and a regular performer with the Riverside Ensemble and the Aurelian Orchestra. Paul has been giving duo recitals throughout Essex for the past seventeen years with the clarinetist Carol Taylor, and together they performed Bruch’s Concerto for Clarinet and Viola with the Essex Chamber Orchestra.

Paul has performed extensively throughout England and abroad, notably in France, Germany, Sweden, Israel, and Russia, and his love of travelling has taken him to most European countries as well as to the USA, Canada, India, Hong Kong and up beyond the Arctic Circle in Norway.

Stephen Ellis

Stephen Ellis studied piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London with Alexander Kelly and Rex Stephens, where he graduated with Honours and was awarded prizes for piano accompaniment. He performs regularly throughout the United Kingdom and internationally, and as worked with many distinguished singers including the late Arleen Auger and the famous soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in her master class series at the Wigmore Hall in London.

Stephen has also been closely associated with the renowned theatre company ‘Opera Circus’ and as pianist/Musical Director, has toured throughout the world taking part in festivals and giving educational workshops. Other companies include ‘Les Bons Vivants’ (with soloists from ‘Covent Garden’) and ‘European Chamber Opera’. He has performed in chamber ensembles such as ‘Badinage’, ’ The Doppler Trio’ and ‘The Regency Ensemble’.

Apart from his performances, Stephen has considerable experience as a piano teacher working with all ages and levels in his private practice and in music colleges, also in master class situations. As a vocal coach, he specializes in operatic and song repertoire, collaborating with young professionals as well as established singers. He has adjudicated fro festivals in the UK, Hong Kong and regularly tutors on summer schools.

Rivalry With Father

Strauss was born in Vienna, Austria, on 25 October 1825, to the famous composer Johann Strauss I. His father did not want him to become a musician but rather a banker. However, Strauss Junior studied the violin secretly as a child, ironically with the first violinist of his father’s orchestra, Franz Amon. When his father discovered this, there was a violent and unpleasant scene and that his father wanted to know nothing of his musical plans. The elder Strauss only wanted his son to escape the rigors of a musician’s life. It was only when his father left the family and took a mistress when he was 17, that Strauss II was able to concentrate fully on a career as a composer with the support of his mother.

His talents were also recognized by composer Josef Drechsler. His other violin teacher, Anton Kollmann also wrote excellent testimonials for him. Armed with these, on the very same day his mother filed a divorce from her husband, he approached the Viennese authorities to apply for a license to perform. He also started to form his small orchestra where he recruited his members.

Johann Strauss I’s influence over the local entertainment establishments meant that many of them were wary of offering the younger Strauss a contract for fear of angering the father. Strauss Jr. was able to persuade the Casino in a suburb of Vienna to allow him to perform. As a result, the local press was soon frantically reporting a ‘Strauss v. Strauss’ rivalry between the father and the son. The elder Strauss, as expected, was furious at his son’s disobedience.

Strauss II found the early years difficult, but he soon won over music-loving audiences after accepting commissions to perform away from home. The first major appointment for the young composer was his award of the honorary position of “Kapellmeister of the 2nd Vienna Citizen’s Regiment”, which had been left vacant following Josef Lanner’s death two years before. Vienna was racked by a bourgeois revolution on February 24, 1848, Strauss I actively joined the actions. As a result, the intense rivalry between father and son became even more apparent.

Broken but Beautiful

Franz Liszt was born on October 22, 1811 in Hungary. He had a very difficult childhood, where he constantly battled sickness, tragedy, and poverty. In the beginning, it had been his father Adam Liszt’s own dream to become a musician. He played piano, violin, violoncello, and guitar; Adam also knew Haydn, Hummel and Beethoven personally.

At age six, Franz began listening attentively to his father’s piano playing as well as to show an interest in both sacred and gypsy music. Adam recognized his son’s musical talent early. He began teaching Franz the piano at age seven and Franz began composing in an elementary manner when he was eight.

Few years later, Liszt moved to Vienna and received piano lessons from Carl Czerny. His public debut in Vienna at the age of 11, it was a great success. He was greeted in Austrian and Hungarian aristocratic circles and also met Beethoven and Schubert. The following year, at a second concert, Beethoven was reputed to have kissed Liszt on the forehead.

After his father’s death Liszt returned to Paris; for the next five years he was to live with his mother in a small apartment. To earn money, Liszt gave lessons in piano playing and composition, often from early morning until late at night. As a result of his exceptional talent, his students were scattered across the city and he often had to cross long distances. Because of this, Liszt kept uncertain hours, and Liszt again fell ill, there was even an obituary notice of him printed in a Paris newspaper. During this period Liszt read widely to overcome his lack of a general education.

Finally, at the age of 21, after attending Paganini’s charity concert for the victims of a Parisian cholera epidemic, Liszt became determined to become as great a virtuoso on the piano as Paganini was on the violin. Soon after he worked closely with Chopin, under his influence Liszt’s poetic and romantic side began to develop.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach. He was the youngest child of Johann Ambrosius Bach, the director of the Stadtpfeifer or town musicians. His father taught him to play violin and harpsichord. His uncles were all professional musicians. One uncle, Johann Christoph Bach, was especially famous and introduced him to the art of organ playing.

Bach’s mother died in 1694, and his father eight months later. The 10-year-old orphan moved in with his oldest brother, the organist at the Michaeliskirche in nearby Ohrdruf. There, he copied, studied and performed music, and apparently received valuable teaching from his brother, who instructed him on the clavichord. The young Bach witnessed and assisted in the maintenance of the organ music. Through the process he often woke up in the middle of the night to secretly copy his favorite scores manually. This ultimately affected Bach’s sight when he aged.

After spending four years at his brother’s home, at the age of 14, Bach was awarded a choral scholarship to study at the prestigious St. Michael’s School. His two years there appear to have been critical in exposing him to a wide palette of European culture. In addition to singing in the a cappella choir, he also played the School’s three-manual organ and its harpsichords.

Frédéric Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola, Poland. He was baptized in Brochów. He was the second Child and the only son of Mikolaj Chopin. In October 1810, when the infant was seven months old, the family moved to Warsaw, where his father took a position as French-language teacher.

In spite of Mikołaj Chopin’s occupation, Polish spirit, culture, and language pervaded the Chopins’ home, and as a result the son would never—even in Paris—perfectly master the French language. Although none of Chopin’s family member are professional musicians, all the family had artistic leanings. Chopin’s father played the flute and violin; Chopin’s mother played piano, and gave lessons to Chopin and other boys in the elite boarding house. Under the influence of his mother, Chopin became conversant with music in its various forms.

As a child Chopin wept with emotion when his mother played the piano. By six, he was already trying to reproduce what he heard or to make up new melodies. He received his earliest piano lessons not from his mother, but from his older sister, Ludwika. His dedicated mother began to arrange Seven-year-old “Little Chopin” to give public concerts that soon prompted comparison with Mozart as a child, and with Chopin’s older contemporary, Beethoven. In those years, Chopin was sometimes invited to the Belweder Palace and charmed the irascible duke with his piano-playing.

Chopin tutored at home until he was 13, enrolled in the Warsaw Lyceum in 1823, but continued studying piano with his first official teacher his mother hired for him, Żywny. In 1825, he entranced the audience with his free improvisation in a concert, and was acclaimed the “best pianist in Warsaw” at the tender age of 15.

Difficult Family, Harsh Father

Beethoven was born in Bonn in 1770. Beethoven’s parents were Johann van Beethoven (1740 in Bonn–1792) and Maria Magdalena Keverich. Of the seven children born to Johann Beethoven, only second-born Ludwig and two younger brothers survived infancy. Beethoven was baptized on 17 December 1770.

Beethoven’s first music teacher was his father, who was a tenor in the service of the court at Bonn. He was reportedly a harsh instructor. Johann later engaged a friend, Tobias Pfeiffer, to preside over his son’s musical training, and it is said Johann and his friend would at times come home late from a night of drinking to pull young Ludwig out of bed to practice until morning.

Beethoven’s talent was recognized at a very early age, and by 1778 he was studying the organ and viola in addition to the piano. His most important teacher in Bonn was Christian Gottlob Neefe, who was the Court’s Organist. Neefe helped Beethoven publish his first composition: a set of keyboard variations.

In 1787, Beethoven travel to Vienna for the first time, in hopes of studying with Mozart. Nevertheless, the declining health of Beethoven’s mother, dying of tuberculosis, forced him to return home after only about two weeks in Vienna. Beethoven’s mother died on 17 July 1787, when Beethoven was 16.

Due to his father’s worsening alcohol addiction, Beethoven became responsible for raising his two younger brothers. In 1792, Beethoven moved to Vienna, where he studied for a time with Joseph Haydn. Beethoven received additional instruction from Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and Antonio Salieri. By 1793, Beethoven established a reputation in Vienna as a piano virtuoso.

Mozart was born in Salzburg into a musical family and showed indications of prodigious abilities at a very young age.  Wolfgang was baptized the day after his birth at St. Rupert’s Cathedral.  His father, Leopold Mozart, was deputy Kapellmeister to the court orchestra of the Archbishop of Salzburg and a minor composer. He was also an experienced teacher; in the year of Mozart’s birth he published a successful violin textbook.  His only sibling who survived past birth was his sister Maria Anna.

When Maria Anna was seven, Leopold began giving her keyboard lessons. The three-year old Mozart looked on, evidently with fascination.  After the lessons, Mozart often spent much time at the keyboard, and his pleasure showed it sounded good to him.  In the fourth year of his age his father, for a game as it were, began to teach him a few minuets and pieces at the keyboard.  To Leopold’s surprise, Mozart could play the tune faultlessly and with the greatest delicacy, and keeping exactly in time.  In addition, his initial ability to learn the violin on his own was astonishing.  At the same time, Mozart started composing little pieces, which he played to his father who wrote them down.  The father and son seem to have been close.  Leopold eventually gave up composing when his son’s outstanding musical talents became evident.  He was Wolfgang’s only teacher in his earliest years. He taught his children languages and academic subjects as well as music.

Much of his childhood and adolescence was taken up with tours, which included performances before many of the royal courts of Europe. When he was six, in order to display Mozart’s abilities as a performer and as a rapidly maturing composer, Leopold made several European journeys in which the children were exhibited as child prodigies.  In reality, these trips were often arduous, because of the primitive conditions of travel at that time, the need to wait patiently for invitations and reimbursement from the nobility.  Nevertheless, during these trips Mozart met a great number of musicians and acquainted himself with the works of other composers. A particularly important influence was Bach, who met Mozart in London in 1764–65.  Few years later, in Rome he heard Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere once in performance in the Sistine Chapel then wrote it out in its entirety from memory, only returning to correct minor errors; thus producing the first illegal copy of this closely-guarded property of the Vatican.