Michael Moran

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On Blogger since October 2006

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About me

Gender Male
Industry Publishing
Occupation Author, Classical Musician, Photographer and Motorist
Location Warsaw, Poland, Poland
Links Audio Clip
Introduction Australian author and classical musician. He seriously studied the piano and harpsichord in London for many years. His piano teacher was Eileen Ralf, a former professor at the Royal Academy of Music and the inspiring teacher of the great Australian pianist Geoffrey Tozer. His harpsichord teacher was Maria Boxall, editor of the keyboard works of the English Baroque composer and organist John Blow as well as a renowned Harpsichord Method. He yearns for the South Pacific islands but through a number of unlikely events and coincidences beached up on the cold shores of the Baltic.
Interests Polish history. English, German and Polish Landscape Gardens. Classic cars particularly Bentley, Bristol, Lagonda, pre-war Rolls-Royce and the MG TC. Alain de Cadenet DVD series 'Victory by Design' is both brilliant and beautiful. Great War fighter pilots and their aircraft, Antique pianos such as Pleyel and Erard. The harpsichords of Ruckers, Taskin and Hemsch. The music written for them played on them. Antique cameras such the Leica M3, Rolleiflex and Nikon F2. State of the Art Hi-Fi (Spendor Speaker fanatic) but love vinyl using SME turntable and tone-arm with Ortofon 'Black' magnetic cartridge with Shibata stylus (prefer to moving-coil).
Favorite Movies The Leopard - Lucio Visconti; Colonel Redl - Istvan Szabo; Ludwig - Lucio Visconti; Jean Luc Godard's 'Le Mepris' and 'Weekend'; most of Claude Chabrol - in fact all the Nouvelle Vague directors; the films of Max Ophuls; Silent cinema in particular the films of Georg Pabst and 'The Diary of a Lost Girl' and 'Pandora's Box' with my favourite actress of all time, Louise Brookes. Most of the films of Robert Bresson and Satyajit Ray.
Favorite Music Fryderyk Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Francois Couperin, J.S.Bach, C.P.E.Bach, Rameau, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, all the Strausses, Messiaen, Boulez, Xenakis, Stockhausen, Lutoslawski
Favorite Books Adolphe - Benjamin Constant; The Diaries of Harold Nicolson, 'Chips' Channon, Diana Cooper and Alan Clark; Princess de Cleves - Madame de Lafayette; The World of Yesterday - Stefan Zweig; The Death of Virgil - Hermann Broch; Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald; The Shooting Party - Isobel Colegate; Anna Karenina, War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy; Victory, Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes, The Secret Sharer, The Outcast of the Islands - Joseph Conrad; The Human Comedy - Balzac; Madame Bovary, Salammbo - Flaubert; Scarlet and Black, L'Amour, the Charterhouse of Parma, Intimate Diaries - Henry Beyle better known as Stendhal; The Leopard - Giuseppe di Lampedusa; Rememberance of Things Past- Marcel Proust; all of Thomas Mann but especially The Magic Mountain and Dr. Faustus; Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf; Almost everything written by Charles Dickens; most of Vladimir Nabokov but especially Speak Memory, Lolita and Ada; Thackeray's Barry Lyndon and Vanity Fair; Nearly all of George Eliot; Jane Austen's Mansfield Park; Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and most of the rest of his output except the disappointing Diaries; Small quantities of P.G. Wodehouse;The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati; most of Kafka including the Diaries; much of Somerset Maugham; Le Grande Meaulnes by Alain Fournier; Poetry of Keats; The Last King of Poland by Adam Zamoyski; The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald;