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Lot 103
MUSIC - JOHN OGDON Remaining papers of the pianist and composer John Ogdon and his wife, the pianist Brenda Lucas, comprising autograph manuscripts and notes, letters, photographs, press cuttings and annotated scores
15 June 2016, 14:00 BST
London, KnightsbridgeSold for £2,750 inc. premium
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MUSIC - JOHN OGDON
Remaining papers of the pianist and composer John Ogdon and his wife, the pianist Brenda Lucas, comprising autograph manuscript and notes by him (including the score of "Busoni's Alternative Ending for 'Al'Italia'", a "Solo Concerto List", a list of Satie works, suggestions for future solo recordings and BBC performances, jottings of performance receipts, a programme note on Sandy Goehr and Ulysses, etc.); correspondence, including letters and cards by John to Brenda (4) and John and Brenda to her mother (6), by John to his supporter Alistair Lord Londonderry (8), and incoming letters by Vladimir ("Vova") Ashkenazy, joint winner with Ogdon of the 1963 Tchaikovsky competition (6), Peter Maxwell-Davies ("...John's sheer musicianship inspired and encouraged us in Manchester through those early years. To have someone around who could realize immediately one's most abstruse musical calculations & experiments was exhilarating and at the same time strangely humiliating – he put such things, by just being himself, into a very clear and sobering perspective..."), Moura Lympany ("...The shock is still there – I can't believe it – but it will really be felt Monday, because I'll be at John's funeral..."), Georg Solti, William Walton (to "Dearest B.B.B.B.": "We are coming to Brighton... to receive my O.M. I've been working very badly – in fact I'm in a hell of a mess...") and others; a photograph of Busoni (showing him playing the piano, signed "Ferruccio Busoni"); an album kept by John of news cuttings from early in his career in an old school exercise book (with Beeston Musical Festival certificate of 1945 pasted in, awarding the eight-year-old Ogdon second prize for sight-reading in the under 18 category, plus photographs of him as a toddler and child); a wedding souvenir album (including the acceptance letter to her parents from his best man, Peter Maxwell-Davies, the order of service, a family wedding photograph, plus cuttings and ephemera pasted into the album after his death); numerous personal and press photographs (Ogdon with Khrushchev, inscribed in Cyrillic by his piano tuner "to my dear pianist", Kiev, 20 September, on reverse, and others also dating from the Tchaikovsky competition, of him performing with Malcolm Sargent, making his ground-breaking recording of Busoni, performing duets with Brenda, at Abbey Road studios, supervising the installation of his Model D Steinway piano via the window of his house at Chester Terrace [see illustration], with Radu Lupu, etc.); a typescript performance diary; a playbill for his Russian concert of 1975; published scores of his Dance Suite for Piano, marked up for performance, and of works by contemporaries published under his aegis (Previn, Stevenson and Hoddinot), the Stevenson annotated ("...represents – Dogs barking..."); a pen-and-brush caricature of Ogdon by [Emilio] Coia, and other material, in several envelopes and folders





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