A gift arrives from America: a pianist colleague has kindly sent me Barbara Alex’s handsome new book about Hungarian piano professor Gyorgy Sebok, who died in 1999. Like all Sebok’s former students, I love to be reminded of how he spoke. He had a gift for aphorism which I’ve never heard equalled, but that doesn’t do […]

This morning I was coaching a very nice piano trio. We were talking about those ‘abstract’ works of Beethoven where the composer builds his material out of little musical ‘cells’ rather than obvious melodies and counter-melodies. Such works are sometimes more difficult for audiences to make sense of, yet often very satisfying for musicians to […]

Today’s Independent newspaper has a review of new books on music, with several paragraphs devoted to mine. Click here if you’d like to read the article by the Independent’s literary editor Boyd Tonkin.

BBC Music Magazine is giving away eight copies of my book ‘Out of Silence’. To enter the draw, all you have to do is answer the question: of which trio is Susan Tomes the pianist? The answer’s easy to find on this website. The draw closes on the 9th August, so if you’re interested, click […]

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 […]