On Saturday, I appeared at the Wigtown Book Festival in Dumfries and Galloway in the west of Scotland (see photo of me being interviewed by Stuart Kelly). Wigtown is Scotland’s ‘national book town’, boasting an astonishing number of bookshops for a small town which is difficult to get to. Yet as several people pointed out, […]

I often tweet about music and related matters. Usually the response is small – I’m thrilled if my tweets reach a couple of hundred people. So my experience yesterday was exceptional. I was watching The Queen’s funeral which, as you’ll know, had a variety of music in it – pipe bands, regimental bands, organ music, […]

At the Edinburgh Festival this week we went to the Usher Hall to hear the French orchestra Les Siècles performing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on instruments of the period. (The difference in those instruments was not immediately apparent, though there was a soft grain to the famous bassoon solo which opens the piece, and other […]

Hearing of the death of renowned theatre director Peter Brook, I went back to my book Beyond the Notes in which I described going to Paris in 1982 to ask his advice about how to keep our chamber music group Domus alive and in good heart despite the many difficulties we were grappling with. His […]

I have been following – online – the Van Cliburn piano competition which takes place every four years in Fort Worth, Texas. As well as being one of the world’s most prestigious it must be the most generous, with an array of prizes and offers of management, concert bookings, recording opportunities, media training, financial training, […]