Richard Osborne devotes a large part of his Music column in ‘The Oldie’ magazine (Summer 2010) to my new book. As I don’t have a picture of the magazine I’ve chosen instead an illustration of an real oldie, one of the 700-year-old oaks in Richmond Park. Richard Osborne writes in The Oldie: ‘Pianist and five-star essayist [...]

A lovely moment during the BBC radio programme ‘Desert Island Discs’ with 90-year-old Dame Fanny Waterman, founder of the Leeds International Piano Competition. Dame Fanny recalled an evening some decades ago when the composer and pianist Benjamin Britten was in her house, preparing for a performance of Schubert’s song cycle ‘Winterreise’ in Leeds that evening. [...]

An uncomfortable experience watching a TV programme about ‘aging rockers’. Rock musicians were interviewed about the experience of growing older, especially in the light of the fact that their teenage lyrics were dismissive of this possibility. I cringed through a 1967 BBC clip of Austrian-born musicologist Hans Keller interviewing Roger Waters and Syd Barrett of [...]

Out of Silence has been reviewed by Julian Haylock in the July/August issue of International Piano magazine. The review is not online, so here’s a glimpse: ‘It is remarkable just how much Tomes manages to find illumination in things that may initially appear musically unpromising. … even celebrity chefs unwittingly provide much food for musical [...]

I went to a lunchtime concert in the City of London, the district where many bank headquarters are. It’s an area I don’t often visit. As I was early, I walked around the streets for a while. They were thronged with incredibly affluent-looking suntanned bankers in beautiful suits, wave upon wave of them, strolling to lunch in [...]