![]() His mother got Lloyd Webber started on piano at age 4 but a year later “I asked to switch to cello. There was no pressure from my parents to play any particular kind of music.” “But it was something we could really take or leave. “There was music really all around,” Lloyd Webber said of growing up in South Kensington near Royal Albert Hall. It was at home - where his mother taught piano and older brother Andrew listened incessantly to rock ’n’ roll - that he developed the desire to play. He was educated at Oxford.”įor his part, Lloyd Webber, 41, studied in Geneva and attended London’s Royal College of Music, where his father was a professor. ![]() “I don’t think Bush ever had quite the same rapport with British leaders that Reagan had with Thatcher.” And as for Clinton: “Everyone here is very hopeful. On that count, the incumbent’s defeat is considered no great tragedy. I think people here are very interested.” What matters most to the British is how the results might impact Anglo-American relations. “It’s been widely covered, particularly in the last week or two. This fall’s campaign was closely watched in Europe, Lloyd Webber noted. Just 12 hours had passed since President-Elect Bill Clinton had thanked supporters gathered outside the Arkansas State House and Lloyd Webber wanted confirmation. But reached November 4 at his English country home near Stratford-upon-Avon, the cellist was perfectly willing to delay any musical discussions. He also has two performances with the Stockton Symphony to promote. Julian Lloyd Webber has a famous brother and more than 30 recordings to his credit. Lloyd Webber is currently married to fellow cellist Jiaxin Cheng and the couple have one daughter, Jasmine Orienta.Īnd for what it’s worth, I dislike his brother’s musicals - have you ever seen “Cats”? An abomination - and listened to a collection of Corelli concerti as I posted this. The child mentioned is David from his first marriage to Zohra Mahmoud Ghazi, an exiled Afghan princess and great-niece of the last king of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Shah. Lloyd Webber was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to music. In the years since this profile, Lloyd Webber was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Music received honorary doctorates from the University of Hull, Plymouth University and Thames Valley University was granted the first busker’s license on the London Underground and was the only classical musician chosen to play at the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony. You can certainly count Julian Lloyd Webber among them. All, however, were remarkably talented and dedicated artists whose knowledge of their instrument and its repertoire simply beggars the imagination. Some of the performers rank among the leading names in classical - Sharon Isbin, Angela Hewitt, Christopher O’Reilly - while others are more obscure. I even performed (read: had a walk-on) in an opera at Pacific in the ’90s, though that is a tale for another time. More to the point, in my 17 years at The Record in Stockton I regularly interviewed a dozen top-flight classical performers annually in the course of previewing Stockton Symphony, Stockton Opera, University of the Pacific Conservatory of Music, Friends of Chamber Music and Bear Valley Music Festival performances. Now a Grammy-nominated musician, my son Kerry’s first exposure to live music was likely the time he was carried babe-in-arms to a Ventura County Symphony performance in Oxnard. Classical proved nothing less than a balm on my soul during my two-plus years in the cultural desert that was Yuma, Ariz., in the mid-1980s. She was the impetus behind me attending my first classical performance, an Andre Watts recital at the IU Auditorium. I have been an avid classical listener dating back to my college days, when I was ushered into the ranks by my first wife-to-be, who had devoted her teen years to playing flute in Indianapolis youth orchestras. I have been remiss in that nearly to the point of ironical. I noticed the other day that with the exception of James Galway and Joshua Bell - or, as he’s known in our house, IU grad Joshua Bell - I have not included any classical performers among the several dozen profiles that comprise this blog.
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