David Pear
Michael Shmith reviews 'Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger' edited by Malcolm Gillies, David Pear, and Mark Carroll and 'Facing Percy Grainger' edited by David Pear
Michael Shmith
Monday, 10 August 2020
To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s description of Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, Percy Grainger is a minstrel wrapped in a harlequin inside a jack-in-the-box. His personality, obsessions, and general eccentricities still cause one to gasp and stretch one’s eyes even almost half a century after his own hypnotic eyes closed forever. His music, too, remains quicksilver; indefinable in its eclecticism, yet the work of a sprite who was also a genius who, magpie-like, collected music from wildly different sources to stuff into the capacious if overcrowded nest that was his mind.
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