Many thanks to everyone who took part in my London masterclasses for playing such a wonderful concert last night! Left to right: me; Perceval Gilles, Pierre-Kaloyann Atanassov, Sarah Sultan (Trio Atanassov); Giuseppina Coni, Giulia Cerra, Valeria Sirangelo (Trio Eclettica); Vashti Hunter, Veronika Kopjova (cello [...]

We’re getting closer now to my London masterclasses in ‘the art of piano chamber music’, this year on 6 and 7 March at the beautiful home of Bob and Elisabeth Boas. Details of the classes are on the ‘Concerts and Events’ tab of my homepage. It’s free to come and listen to the main classes, [...]

Went to see the new Coen Brothers’ film, Inside Llewyn Davis, the tale of a moderately successful American folk singer in 1961, on the cusp of the Bob Dylan era. After the death of his duo partner, Llewyn is trying to make it in Greenwich Village as a solo artist. The title of his new [...]

Yesterday I listened to a BBC Radio 4 programme about Henry Cole, the founder of the splendid V&A Museum in South Kensington. They were talking to a curator of the David Bowie exhibition, one of the most successful of the V&A’s recent exhibitions. The curator was asked why they had chosen to focus on David [...]

I’ve been practising Schumann’s ‘Papillons’, a cycle of piano pieces containing various motifs and references which reappear in his later piano music. It seems that for Schumann, butterflies were associated with the novels of Jean Paul, one of his favourite authors, who often wrote about the soul’s struggle to resolve its identity. In fact, the [...]