John Ogdon

While the Yard finds himself museless, me I find myself in the grip of a bastard 'summer cold'. But I don't complain. Yes I do...
Anyway, today is the 20th anniversary of the death of the prodigiously gifted pianist John Ogdon (and, oddly, the 12th anniversary of Sviatoslav Richter's death). I saw Ogdon twice in my life. The first time was on a boyhhood holiday with my brother and grandmother at some seaside resort (it might have been Folkestone, still at that time a genteel resort). My grandmother took us to a recital by Ogdon, who played the Moonlight sonata and I can't remember what else. I was duly impressed, but my grandmother - a woman whose cultural horizons were not of the broadest - was less convinced. 'He's good,' she opined, 'but he's not as good as Russ Conway, is he?' Many years later, I was at the launch of a book about children's radio when I noticed a plump, tweed-coated, bear-like man with a shock of curly grey hair wandering vaguely around the edges of the crowd looking bewildered. With a shock, I realised that it was Ogdon - a fact confirmed when a Radio 3 music producer pounced on him and swept him away. This must have been shortly before his death.
Here's a snatch of Ogdon in his prime, playing the Hammerklavier.