I’ve just finished reading a fascinating book published in 1944: The Baton and the Jackboot, by Berta Geissmar, the personal assistant of conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler during his great days in Germany. After Geissmar had been forced to leave Germany during the Hitler regime, she emigrated to London where she became the assistant of conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. [...]

A friend of ours is in a West End play at the moment, and I wanted to read the reviews. Simply by typing the name of the play into Google News, I had all the reviews lined up neatly before me. Click! click! click! click! click! and I had surveyed the full range of critical [...]

Interesting article the other day in The Guardian about the fact that many people now chat online about what they’re watching on TV, while they’re watching it. They don’t wait for the end of the programme, but start commenting on Twitter right away about things that annoy them, please them, or make them laugh. TV [...]

To a viol masterclass given by the eiminent Catalan viol player Jordi Savall at the Royal College of Music. As always happens when I listen to ‘early music’, it took me a little while to tune in to the quiet sound level favoured by the players. It’s so different from the strong, projected sound used [...]

Went to a marvellous cello masterclass given by Johannes Goritzki at the Royal College of Music. He spent hours persuading the students that playing the cello was easier than they thought, just a matter of applying weight in the right place, not working against the natural functions of muscles, understanding that the cello bow can [...]