A friend has been telling me about a DVD of cellist Bernard Greenhouse giving masterclasses. Greenhouse spoke about the great Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, with whom he had studied. Casals was well-known for his love of smoking a pipe. Asked how much he smoked, he once replied, ‘As much as possible.’ Lighting his pipe when [...]

This is our cat at her 14th birthday party. She has been having chemotherapy for 15 months now. She’s responded to it extremely well, but all the same we felt that her 14th birthday was something to celebrate.  Now that the cat is on steroids, she has changed the habits of a lifetime and now likes [...]

I recently made up a couple of cadenzas for a Haydn piano concerto. I kind of improvised them at the piano, and played them in the concert without ever writing them out. Afterwards, I thought I’d try and note them down before I forgot them entirely. Cadenzas are supposed to be, or at least sound, [...]