Someone asked me today whether my new book, Out of Silence, is a collection of my blog posts. It isn’t; the book was written a year before I had the idea of starting a website or a blog. I suppose the experience of writing ‘a pianist’s yearbook’ may have given me an appetite for more of the [...]

Today’s Independent has my review of Eric Siblin’s book, ‘The Cello Suites’. Siblin, a former pop critic, describes how he fell in love unexpectedly with Bach’s cello music and set himself to find out all he could about the composer, and  about cellist Pablo Casals, the first person to bring the Bach cello suites to a wider public in [...]

A nice surprise today: Bob came back from a meeting with a magazine page brought along by a colleague. It was from the February issue of the leading French record magazine Diapason, one of whose editors had taken the new Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music as the subject of his editorial. The Cambridge Companion, an [...]

My publisher, Boydell Press, has put a short extract from my new book Out of Silence on their blog.  You can read it by clicking here. The blog also shows the book’s cover image for the first time. I’m irrationally proud of this cover because I took the photograph! It aims to give the impression of someone coming [...]

A most unexpected and heartwarming New Year gift arrived today in the form of a comment made in a Times book review by the distinguished cellist Natalie Clein. Reviewing a new book on Bach’s cello suites, she muses on the difficulty of writing about music, and says, ‘The most successful writers are often musicians themselves [...]