I didn’t manage to catch many of the programmes charting the progress of BBC Young Musician of the Year 2010, but I’m proud to say that I did pick out the eventual winner, 16-year-old pianist Lara Omeroglu, when she first appeared in a keyboard category final. Not that it was really difficult to do. She seems to have [...]

I played a concert this week and noticed that my page-turner, sitting beside me at the piano, was holding what looked like a generous square of fudge in her left hand. As a fudge fan myself, I didn’t find it hard to imagine why one would wish to have a square of fudge on stage, [...]

My piano tuner asks whether I’m happy to keep my piano at the usual pitch, A=440. Yes. Why wouldn’t I be? Well, he says, some British orchestras are now asking for pianos to be tuned at A=442 Hz. Now that there’s so much musical traffic between countries, we’re under pressure to adopt ‘European’ tuning, and [...]

Last night we watched an enjoyable BBC4 programme, ‘The Great American Songbook’. Various artists such as Paolo Nutini, Melody Gardot, Krystle Warren, Gwyneth Herbert, José James and my own personal favourite, Claire Martin gave us their own, updated versions of classic songs from the 1920s onwards. I love the ‘golden age’ of American musicals (Gershwin, [...]

At the moment I have seven or eight new pieces on the music desk of my piano. I have to learn them all by the summer. Some are works I’ve never heard played, and in such cases I find it helpful to listen to a recording before I start work. The internet has made things far [...]