My disc has been in and out of print for some time now, but people never stop asking where they can get hold of it. It sometimes pops up, for an astonishing variety of prices, on collectors’ websites, and Amazon has recently made individual tracks available as mp3 files. But no record company has shown interest in a new disc of Mayerl’s music.

Recently, at a series of London concerts, several people asked me if I had a new Mayerl recording in the pipeline. I realised I was fed up with saying no. Instead, I’m wondering about recording some new tracks played by me in my own home. In these days of recordings being manicured to within an inch of their lives, I think there could be something special about hearing what a musician sounds like by their own fireside.

My plan is to record some new Mayerl pieces, and sell them track by track as downloads on my website. If it goes well, maybe I’ll move on to other composers.

But first I’d like to get some idea of whether people out there would buy my new Billy Mayerl tracks – pieces that don’t appear on the ‘Loose Elbows’ disc. Feedback would be welcome – either as a ‘comment’ on this post (which will be visible to everyone), or by writing to me privately at susan@susantomes.com. An easy way to do that is to click on the ’send her an e-mail’ link under my tiny photo, in the left hand column of this page.

Billy Mayerl piano music recording project is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

“I don’t really think people get that absorbed in music at the moment,” says Simons. “They’re streaming it, they’re watching YouTube clips. People say ‘I listened to this’ and you think ‘Yeah, did you listen to it on computer speakers?’

This surprised me for several reasons: first, to hear that people ‘don’t get that absorbed in music at the moment’ (not my impression at all, I must say, but I’m in a different field of music). Second, to hear Ed Simons putting forward computer speakers as the better way to listen to music.

If it had been my interview, I would have answered differently – ‘People are listening to music on computer speakers. People say ‘I listened to this’ and you think, ‘Yes, but have you heard us play live? Recordings are nothing in comparison.’

Listening on computer speakers is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

At the concert there were two different string quartet groups, giving me the chance to listen to two of my favourite violinists as quartet leaders. Readers of this blog already know how much I admire Viennese violinist Erich Höbarth, with whom I’m halfway through a Mozart Series in Perth Concert Hall. The other quartet was led by American violinist Daniel Phillips of the New-York-based Orion Quartet.

Both these players are to my way of thinking ideal examples of how to approach chamber music. Their performances are totally focused, without ever showing off or deliberately drawing attention to themselves for effect. Many musicians add a layer of ‘mime’ to signal their feelings and point out certain musical twists and turns to the audience. I can’t dismiss this kind of approach, as I know from experience that many audience members like it, even rely on it. However, speaking for myself, I’m more fascinated by musicians whose gestures are economical and whose concentration draws the audience in. Any dramatic visual effects arise from their efforts to express the music, but otherwise their understanding is transmitted entirely in sound. It feels as if the music is too important for mere display. This is not to say, of course, that they are not interesting to watch – on the contrary. They are interesting precisely because they are not trying to manipulate what I see.

Not showing off is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

‘In this second of the series, the supreme level of partnership was maintained, and the plus was that the works were even better…. Hearing this partnership, you could believe that no-one could play these works better, ‘ wrote Ian Stuart-Hunter in the Perthshire Advertiser.

The photo shows Erich and me at the end of our rehearsal.

Perth Advertiser review is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

The Portrait Gallery is in a most attractive old building and always has interesting exhibitions. Moreover, it has a very nice cafe. Before it closed for renovation, the cafe used to serve delightful cheese scones, large and golden-brown with a real ‘kick’ of cheese. I missed these scones during the two-year closure, and was worried that they would have disappeared from the menu when the Gallery re-opened. Cheekily, I e-mailed the Gallery’s management team to ask. With perfect politeness they replied that yes, indeed, cheese scones would be back on the menu, and they hoped I would enjoy my visit. They did not reproach me for having my priorities all wrong. I feel this is the mark of a civilised establishment.

I already knew they were civilised. Some years ago I visited the Gallery when I had awful bronchitis. In one of the exhibition rooms I was overtaken by a bout of coughing so bad that I thought I might need medical help. One of the attendants brought me a chair, and quietly cleared the room of visitors. I sat there gradually getting my breath back, watched silently by the famous Scots gazing down at me from their frames.

Cheese scones is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

You can read the Herald interview here.

Herald interview is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

‘Shall I ask you to try again, or is there no point?’

‘You line the notes up in front of you and shoot them one by one.’

‘Between you and music there is a brick wall forever fixed.’

‘Yours is the sort of playing I’ve spent 25 years of my life trying to stamp out.’

As an occasional teacher myself, I find it distressing that people are so impressed by devastating criticism. Maybe I come from a different tradition; at any rate, I wouldn’t allow myself to say those kind of humiliating things to students. When I’m in the audience at a masterclass I quite often think, ‘Yes, I might have made that same point myself, but I wouldn’t have made it like that, for God’s sake!’  Direct criticism, yes; humorous observations, yes; but not humiliating remarks. As a student I found that mean remarks from a teacher just made me feel very detached and remote. I didn’t respect them more for being horrid to me. Therefore I’m surprised by how many people can somehow persuade themselves that being verbally mauled by ‘a master’ has done them good. They might have been hurt or angry at the time, but they eventually find a way to look back on it and say that it was a transformative experience. At the very least, they come to think that it has enhanced their coping strategies.

For the audience there’s an theatrical frisson to a masterclass in which a student gets savaged. It feels a bit like watching those nature programmes in which a huge aggressive polar bear, rampaging around in a territorial dispute, sits down on a baby bear and crushes it. It’s horrifying but awe-inspiring.

Some ‘masters’ play to the gallery in this respect, courting laughter and the shocked intake of breath. You’d think students on the receiving end of their larger-than-life jibes would hate the teachers for it, but they don’t; there seems to be something in human psychology which makes us feel there is ‘more truth’ in wounding remarks than in the same advice considerately given.

Coping with unkind remarks is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

Conway Hall (25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, London WC1) is Europe’s longest-running chamber music series, and has been going since 1887. The series has gone through some wobbly patches, partly due to its policy of making tickets affordable for everyone, but the new organisers are determined to pursue this long-running idealistic policy. Even today the price of admission is only £8, or £4 for concessions. Very unusually, you cannot buy tickets in advance – which makes it a slightly nerve-racking experience for all concerned! So please just turn up on the night and come to hear Mozart, Ligeti and Schumann. The start time of 6.30pm is unusual too – but rather a good idea, I think, because it means people can eat afterwards without making it a very late evening.

Sunday at Conway Hall is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

Like several of his compatriots, such as Sandor Vegh, Gyorgy Sebok and Gyorgy Kurtag, Rados’s style of teaching is intense, vivid and unpredictable. He speaks very quietly, so in a big hall we all had to strain to hear. He focuses above all on how to make the underlying structure of the music clear. He also talks a lot about how to read the ‘grammar’ of each musical sentence. Today he said that even if a piece of music seems to be in a language we do not yet know, we can still sense whether the shape of a musical sentence is plausible – whether syllables are being articulated, whether there is movement through the sentence, whether there is space to breathe. I don’t know whether this ‘parsing’ of musical phrases works in all types of music (not all music resembles speech, after all), but treating music as if it were a compelling piece of oratory often brings it to life in a very immediate and satisfying way.

His determination to do justice to the music sometimes makes him ruthless towards the performers. This is a very different style of teaching than the one we’re used to here, particularly in our present era of ’supporting the student and bolstering their self-esteem’. Bolstering their self-esteem appears to play no part in the Hungarian method; on the contrary, it often feels (as one of the participants said afterwards) as if the intention is to make them realise how small they are, and what a long way there still is to go. Some people rise wonderfully to the challenge ; others just clam up and turn away. I think most people sense that the focus is on the greatness of the music, not the ego of the performer; that’s as it should be, but it’s asking a lot for young musicians to respond instantly and positively in front of an audience containing their friends, tutors, agents, and competitors.

My favourite moment today was when Rados spoke about the many different ways to play something quietly. ‘You seem to think that ‘piano’ is always something lovely, sweet, tender, melodic, romantic,’ he said to one of the groups. ‘But it can be so many different things. Here, for example, it is a secret fortissimo!’ He chuckled and went on in a low tone, ‘You know, in a Hitchcock movie, the most dangerous words are whispered.’

‘The most dangerous words are whispered’ is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

Erich and I are hoping that this will help to swell the audience for the next concert in our Mozart Series, on December 14 in the Horsecross Concert Hall in Perth.

 The hall seats 1000, so anything but a really substantial audience looks a bit lost in the space, and is scary to contemplate from the stage. We hope lots of Perthshire music lovers will notice the review and rally round in December.

Perthshire Advertiser review is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

‘Some of the most intuitive, candid and affectionate ensemble playing I’ve heard.’

(Guardian, 15 Nov 11)

Five-star review in today’s Guardian is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

For this series, I’ve been preparing nearly twenty works by Mozart – duo sonatas and solo piano pieces. It’s not often that one gets the chance to be so steeped in the work of a particular composer, tackling so many works in a short period of time. I’ve known these works for a long time but have never had a reason to practise them, round and round, so intensively.

Musicians always say that Mozart is one of the most demanding of composers because his music is ’so exposed’. Every note counts and has to be heard in the right relation to the notes around it. Everything has to sound clear and balanced, but not effortful, because the lightness and sense of fun are also essential. On the other hand, the apparent lightness must never conceal the deep feelings running through, or underneath, many of the passages. The balance between the elements of the music is more beautifully judged, and on a finer scale, than that of any other music I know. The more I look into it, the more I respect it. It’s nice to be spending so much time with this music. When the work is going well, I find that it has a very good effect on me.

Living with Mozart is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

The photo shows the Cosima Piano Quintet at the start of a coaching session yesterday, part of the first Marryat Chamber Music weekend which ended last night with a wonderful concert by four young ensembles made up of post-grad and young professional players from countries as far apart as Kazakhstan, Israel and Tasmania as well as the UK. Such a rich cultural environment is a great help when we’re all exploring different ideas and ways of doing things. Some people were surprised and amused or bemused to discover that their way of doing things seemed ‘typically British’ (or Eastern European or whatever) to others. It’s good to be surrounded by examples of other ways to do things, because they can often be directly inspiring, without any need for words or theories.

Exploring other ways of doing things is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

Piano and violin, I hear you say? Isn’t it ‘violin and piano’? Well, not according to Mozart who called them ‘sonatas for piano and violin’. In his letters, he mentions playing the piano parts himself ‘with the accompaniment of a violin’. That was how they were perceived until the nineteenth century and the age of the celebrity violinist, when things flipped around. These works, and many others like them, started to be listed as ‘violin sonatas’, and the piano part was suddenly ‘the accompaniment’. Even today the violinist is often the one with their photo on the record cover, the one whose name is in bigger font in the programme, or the only one whose name is mentioned at the end of the radio broadcast.

Why does this matter? It matters because the re-labelling tricks people into perceiving things falsely. They expect the violin part to be the leading voice, when in fact the meat of the musical narrative is in the piano part. If you approach these works expecting the violin part to be pre-eminent, you experience a kind of cognitive dissonance as you listen: often the violin is doing something quite modest, and you sense that the piano part is full of interest and information, but you don’t understand why such prominent material should be relegated to ‘the accompaniment’. The answer is that it isn’t an accompaniment. If you switch to hearing the music as piano with violin, everything falls into place. Of course you still need an excellent violinist, and perhaps even more importantly, an excellent musician, both of which I’m fortunate to have.

With more historical awareness, and with the intervention of a few strong-minded pianists, things are beginning to move back to Mozart’s original concept of ‘sonatas for piano with violin’. If you look up all the available recordings on Spotify, you’ll find about half of the duo sonatas advertised with the pianist’s name first, the other half with the violinist’s name first. This shows the confusion around the topic. It’s clearly a situation in transition, but at least there is movement.

Sonatas for piano and violin is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

I was repeatedly struck by the fact that their selection was never the same as the jury’s. It’s probably simplistic to say so, but I often felt the public’s approval tended to fall on groups with a very showy platform manner, groups who had taken great trouble over their appearance, or groups which happened to feature a particularly good-looking person. The jury was not immune to those factors, naturally, but they came lower down our list of priorities. Maybe I just happened upon an un-representative selection of audience members, but I became conscious of their disappointment when certain groups didn’t do as well as they had expected. There was no forum in which the jury could explain what they were listening for and why – the audience just had to accept our decisions, as the competitors did. But I was a little sad that we and the audience didn’t always see eye to eye on those decisions. For one thing, I’d like to think that the jury is identifying a new generation of musicians whom the public will love and appreciate.

Differing tastes is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

The Trondheim International Chamber Competition finished on Sunday with the Trio Paul Klee, from Paris, as the winners of the first prize. The London-based Fournier Trio (see photo) won the second prize and the Audience Prize, which will bring them back to Trondheim next year for a series of concerts. Third prize went to the Atanassov Trio, also from Paris. All three groups had tremendous qualities, and look set for fine careers.

Curiously enough the Final Round, at least in my view, was less impressive than the earlier rounds. All the participants had to play either Schubert’s B flat Trio or Beethoven’s Archduke, and it suddenly seemed as if they all felt they were little people walking around in giant’s shoes. This is, I think, a tribute to the sheer grandeur of those pieces of music. However, despite the Final not being quite as satisfying as I had hoped, the standard of playing overall was very high. I will treasure in particular the memory of the second round, in which the Atanassov Trio and the Fournier Trio played Schumann no 2 so beautifully, and the Trio Paul Klee were so wonderfully attuned to Brahms.

Klee, Fournier, Atanassov Trios is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

Today we reached the semi-final stage of the competition, and have chosen three trios for Sunday’s final. Two are based in Paris -the Trio Paul Klee, and the Trio Atanassov. The third, the Fournier Trio, is based in London. I say ‘based in’ because the nine musicians involved in these trios cover a wide geographical area from Australia to Korea as well as France and the UK.

It is very interesting how sometimes we all sit earnestly writing comments in our jury notes while people play. Sometimes, I feel compelled by the quality of the playing to put down my pencil and just sit back and enjoy the music-making, and often when I glance to my left and right along the row of tables, I realise that my fellow jurors are doing the same. These are my favourite moments of the competition.

Trondheim trio competition is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

My favourite poster uses the title of a Brett Dean composition, ‘Twelve Angry Men’, inspired by the Hollywood film of that name about a conscientious jury. In an inspired stroke Dean has tranposed the twelve angry men into a phalanx of cellists. The poster says (in Norwegian), ’Chamber Music is Twelve Angry Men’. 

On the side of my hotel is a huge version of this particular poster (see photo). Musicians see it every time they cross the bridge, and their comments are wry. Twelve angry men? ‘That would be three string quartets, then.’

‘12 angry men’ is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

 At the end of the first number, an intriguing blend of soulful song with mandolin pyrotechnics, the audience nearly raised the roof with their cheering and whooping. Over the tumult I shouted to Bob, ‘It never sounds like this at my concerts!’ He shouted back, ‘It’s just a different style of behaviour. Your audiences like your concerts just as much in their own way. They’re just more restrained!’ I tried to hold that thought in my mind for the rest of the evening, and it was a great evening, satisfying in lots of ways. But at the end, as we all yelled for an encore, I found myself weak with envy of the two performers for having this kind of audience in front of them on a regular basis. How I would love to hear that kind of clamour at the end of every piece! I felt like jumping up on my seat as everyone filed out and begging them, ‘Please, please, nice jazz audience, come along to my concerts too!’ Alas, I was too restrained.

Styles of audience is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

Fortunately this has been a quiet period, concert-wise, but nevertheless I’ve had to practise for things coming up. I can play gently and slowly with my left hand, re-fingering as I go, but I can’t put any pressure on the sore finger, at least not without yelping and snatching my hand away from the keyboard in fright. I now have some medication for it, so with luck it will be better by the time I next have to play in public. But honestly! What a stupid little problem for a pianist.

A sore finger is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog