Here are Eva Hoffman, Janice Galloway and me at the Royal Festival Hall discussing what it’s like to write about music and musicians. Janice got us all laughing, and it turned into a fun evening. We three speakers all said something about why we wanted to write about music; we read extracts from our books, [...]

On Saturday night I gave a solo recital in Cambridge. It was unexpectedly enjoyable because of the audience’s warm response. Even in this season of coughs and colds, they kept utterly silent while I was playing (which has not always been the case elsewhere this winter). Every audience has its own character, and this audience [...]

I’m looking forward to taking part in a literature event at the South Bank on Monday evening at 7.45pm. The novelist Eva Hoffman has invited fellow novelist Janice Galloway and me to join her in a discussion of what it’s like to write about music. I don’t really know either of them except through their [...]

This photo shows me outside the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, standing beside the poster for the Florestan Trio’s three concerts.
On the day after the concerts, Bob and I caught the old tram up the hill of the Alfama district to visit the castle. While we were standing on the crowded tram, Bob’s wallet was stolen. [...]

When I got back from Lisbon this afternoon, I looked at my website statistics and saw that an awful lot of people had looked at the website on Saturday while I was away. I realised later that it must have been because of the Guardian’s heart-warming review that day of the Florestan Trio’s Wigmore Hall concert. ‘Every [...]