There had even been, so the rumour went, a number of fake Kit Armstrongs floating around the web. He was in fact already very present on YouTube, playing Bach ridiculously well at six, his feet barely reaching the pedals. When I suggested to Alfred’s manager Tom Hull that I wanted to make a film about the master and his young apprentice, he warned that they were shielding Kit from media attention, as they – wisely - didn’t want him spun into another celeb prodigy. It was the Nocturne he now played me that decided Alfred to teach Kit Armstrong - the first child pianist he had ever taken on. He slipped the CD into the player, his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm.įor Alfred Brendel to approve of a pianist’s Chopin was remarkable: he had once told me that he’d left the composer alone as Alfred Cortot’s Chopin could not be bettered. Alfred led me into his inner sanctum, a practice room filled to bursting with two Steinways, a large carved idol from New Guinea, Liszt’s death mask and a rich and varied collection of paintings and images, some of them revealing the pianist’s wicked Dadaist sense of humour.
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