Mark Viner

Having won BBC Young Musician when she was just 16, Lara Melda decided to take her time to mature and develop as an artist. Eight years on, Jessica Duchen discovers that Melda’s carefully paced approach to her career is paying off

Can an artist’s musical accomplishments be separated from their life’s philosophy? Benjamin Ivry considers the legacy of pianist and Nazi sympathiser Elly Ney

Everything about the British pianist Mark Viner breaks the mould: an autodidact and a late starter at the keyboard, he quickly grew into a supple, virtuosic player who seems to turn every technical challenge into a musical asset, excelling in repertoire that few others have touched. Jeremy Nicholas meets an exceptional young artist with an uncompromising and distinctive personality both on and off the stage

His musical reputation rests on a single piece – and a fragment at that. There is, however, more to Henry Litolff than his famous Scherzo. Jeremy Nicholas celebrates the eccentric life and career of a composer whose bicentenary this year has practically been ignored, but whose restless, sometimes scandalous spirit spread its influence across 19th-century Europe, captivating the great Franz Liszt himself

Robert Turnbull assesses the growing contribution to the piano repertoire that has resulted from painstaking research by the Bru Zane Foundation, champion of forgotten but rewarding avenues of French music from the 19th and early 20th century

A unique multimedia project, built around settings of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite featuring solo piano and ballerina, is about to set off on an ambitious international tour. Claire Jackson meets the project’s creator, Alexandra Dariescu, a pianist who likes to think differently

Murray McLachlan is delighted by the qualities of the Kawai Novus NV10, a hybrid piano that offers a multitude of features for technologically savvy players in a neat package that is competitively priced and well adapted to modern lifestyles

IP surveys some of the hottest new products launched at this year’s Musikmesse in Frankfurt

His free-spirited approach to jazz may have been more studied than it first seemed, but Cecil Taylor remains a revolutionary figure in the jazz world, bringing a ‘dirty’, visceral approach to his music-making that is unique and deeply personal. Andy Hamilton relates the story of a jazz outsider who has been brought back into the fold

Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt, who celebrates her 60th birthday this July, looks back to her formative years as a young woman in France and England, full of inspiring encounters that were to shape her music-making for decades to come