If anyone would like to hear the Florestan Trio playing live on radio and chatting about its Wigmore Hall concerts this week, we’ll be on BBC Radio 3’s drive-time programme, In Tune, this evening between about 6.15-6.45pm. We’ll be playing Beethoven, Shostakovich and Haydn and talking to presenter Sean Rafferty. You can also listen via the […]

To the Festival Hall this morning with Bob to attend an Open Rehearsal of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra from Venezuela. By the time we got round to asking about tickets for their two London concerts, they had long been sold out. This open rehearsal is our only chance to hear them, and at 10am […]

We went to the Orange Tree Theatre to see the premiere of a play, ‘The Story of Vasco’, translated and adapted by Ted Hughes from an original play by Lebanese writer Georges Schehadé. Hughes’ adaptation had never before been performed in its entirety; the director had rescued it from Hughes’s papers in an American university […]

I’ve just been to Salzburg to play a concert in the Mozarteum with the Gaudier Ensemble. Leaving London in spring weather, it was startling to find ourselves walking through the Mirabell Gardens a few hours later in heavy snow. How strange travel is! One minute you’re having breakfast in London and the next, you’re gazing […]

Went to a jazz gig performed by a group called ‘Way Out West‘, a collective of about twenty jazz musicians who live in this part of London. Seven of them were there on the night, plus two singers out of the three who were advertised. They explained that ‘Way Out West’ accepts invitations all over […]