John Browning & David Dubal, 6/27/83

One in a series of radio programs titled "For the Love of Music," hosted by David Dubal on WNCN-FM, New York. Guest is pianist John Browning. This program was originally broadcast on or around June 27, 1983; musical selections have been removed to comply with copyright restrictions.
David Dubal can be contacted at daviddubalsociety [at] gmail
A book titled ‘Selected Paintings and Drawings of David Dubal’ is available for sale at Amazon:
www.amazon.com/Selected-Paint...
To access David Dubal's Wikipedia page, please click on the link below: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_D...
Recordings of piano performances by David Dubal and Stanley Waldoff, released on the ArkivCD label, can be purchased from ArkivMusic at:
www.arkivmusic.com/Catalog/Pr...
David Dubal hosts "The Piano Matters," a program devoted to piano music, which can be heard at wwfm.org on Wednesdays at 10 PM and Sundays at noon. Archived programs of "The Piano Matters" are accessible as webcasts at:
www.wwfm.org/programs/piano-m...
For more information on WNCN-FM and photographs of its staff, please visit the WNCN-FM website www.wncn.org/

[@daviddemers9093]

What a gentle man John was; he was so kind and spent over an hour speaking with me (a young inexperienced teen) after his concert with Szell and Cleveland after having performed the Barber concerto at UCONN in Storrs, Connecticut back in 1969! I was bowled over by this giant. He drove away in his Ford convertible and I never saw him again alas.

[@charlesleseau]

Marvelous musician, marvelous mind. It's one of the great musical events in my life that I had a chance to see Browning perform before he died. Thanks for posting this.

[@1trschaefer78]

Wonderful interview with a great pianist!

[@drjerryw6375]

What a marvelous treasure! A must listen for every aspiring pianist as well as every music lover. Every interview of David Dubal’s years as a broadcaster should be available to the world. It would be a better place

[@jazzstandardman]

Thanks for uploading this. Browning was opinionated, but somehow his opinions were authoritative and truly thought-provoking.

[@davidlasson2558]

I would have enjoyed this more had the musical performances not been edited out. (They are left intact in Dubal's interviews with Charles Rosen and Murray Perahia, also available on KZbin.)

[@noochinator]

Yeah, sometimes YT blocks, sometimes they don't...

[@jackatherton0111]

Browning talked the way he played, with precision, elegance, humor and dash, the product of great discipline. This might not guarantee expressiveness, and I’ve never warmed to one of Browning’s better known recordings (for which you’d think he’d been born) the Chopin Etudes. But particularly after the mid-life crisis he discussed here, Browning gave us on Denon precise but also profound recordings of Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Mozart. At his best, one of my favorite musicians. And no one does a funnier and more tender impression of Rosina Lhevinne!

[@Radiatoron88]

I wonder if John Browning was a lefty--seeing that he is holding a cigarette in his left hand. I remember reading in some interview of J.B.--it might well have been in one of David Dubal's interviews of great pianists books--that he jokingly said that when he died, he hoped heaven wouldn't be filled with the sound of harps, not being a particular fan of harps. It's nice to imagine that when pianists pass on, the heaven they go to has the music and instruments of their choice! P.S. Boo on the cigarette and all the cigarette smoke of those--cough-cough--days! As a "boomer," I grew up (or maybe down) in those days, when it was pretty much taken for granted that most people--or at least many people--smoked. When I was young and riding the bus from Chicago to the University of Iowa, smoking was allowed in the back rows of the bus. Delightful. All it took was one smoker in the back to totally destroy the air on the bus. Yay. Loved that. And, of course, those were the days when smoking was still allowed on planes as well. Also delightful. Okay, not so much. So many people just had to have their cigarettes, I guess. And now a great many young people are taking up the filthy habit as well, even though there is no longer any doubt about smoking often leading to lung cancer and other diseases. Since I suppose they think it looks cool and they can show how mature they are by fouling up the air. End of rant. I had exactly one cassette tape of John Browning's playing, and it was of the Chopin Etudes. I wish I could say I can remember his performances on that tape, but I can't. But anyone who can play all of the Chopin Etudes--much less perform and/or record them--gets a deep bow from me.

[@johndoily9407]

totally agree with his statement about young people. Older people only care about peddling their own views through the younger generation, because they can easily be taken advantage of. They kill individuality, and develop personalities of cabbages.

[@stefanbernhard2710]

Facts