Well, I wasn’t sitting in an empty room, but I can’t pretend that my discussion session in Glasgow was a great success. Had it not been for several members of the teaching faculty coming to my rescue, it would have been a rather silent room.  My masterclass  was most enjoyable, but in retrospect I feel [...]

In the past few days I’ve spent some time studying scores of pieces I’m going to be teaching in a masterclass at the RSAMD this week. The date has been in my diary for a long time, but because the academic year only began a couple of weeks ago, it was impossible to find out who the students would [...]

It’s a double-edged feeling when you come across something superb by someone you’ve never heard of. Happy to discover them, but sad that they seem to have fallen through the net of history. That’s how we felt on seeing ‘Alison’s House’, by the American playwright Susan Glaspell, at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. We’d [...]

To Steinway Hall in London, to choose a piano for the Florestan Trio’s  Hyperion recording of Shostakovich next January. Whenever I’m able to select an piano, I have to do my research well ahead of time, because the best ones get booked up months in advance. Each piano is slightly different from the next, so for each new [...]

It’s always seemed rather odd to me that the academic year and the new concert season start in the autumn. I understand that historically it’s to do with the harvest being gathered in, and a season of work being finished, after which it’s time to start new things. Somehow this centuries-old pattern of structuring the [...]