Classical Music in Poland and the Europe of Chopin - From the Reviewer's Notebook

Fountains Abbey North Yorkshire Water Garden and Temple of Piety Studley Royal Landscape Garden North Yorkshire The Royal Geographical Society Fellows Lecture on Polish landscapes and associated ecological issues delivered on May 18th. went particularly well with an audience of around 750 at the headquarters in Kensington Gore, London. It was a particularly busy day at the Society with various dinners and meetings which rather distracted specialist attention from my lecture - thank goodness. The Polish  gorale wedding music was particularly successful, as were the musical elements from the great Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff playing Chopin mazurkas and the extract from Andrzej Wajda's wonderful nostalgic film Pan Tadeusz which concluded the lecture . The listeners seemed particularly surprised at the beauty of the Polish countryside despite so much of it being flat. As usual at these events a surprisingly small number of copies of A Country in the Moon were sold - ab