This morning we listened to a delightful edition of ‘Desert Island Discs’ featuring Sir David Attenborough, irresistible as always. What a lovely voice he has!
‘Desert Island Discs’ is a long-running radio series in which each ‘castaway’ chooses the eight records they’d like to take to an imaginary desert island. In between musical choices, they talk [...]

Some years ago I recorded ‘Loose Elbows’, a CD of Billy Mayerl’s piano music. It features some of the sparkling, good-humoured pieces Billy wrote when he was the celebrated pianist at the Savoy Hotel in London in the 1920s and 30s.
My disc has been in and out of print for some time now, but people [...]

An intriguing article in the Guardian this week about The Chemical Brothers. They’re  thoughtful and interesting, but some of their comments about music and audiences were startling for me, because they showed such a different facet of the music world.
“I don’t really think people get that absorbed in music at the moment,” says Simons. “They’re [...]

As an antidote to all the stress of last week, we went to see The Artist, the French film which is now starting to win all kinds of awards. I had read of its producer’s difficulties in persuading people to back his eccentric idea of making a silent, black-and-white movie. Thank goodness he persisted and [...]

On the day after the first of the Florestan Trio’s Beethoven Cycle concerts in the Wigmore Hall on Friday, a kind member of the audience invited me to lunch in Le Caprice, a lovely restaurant to which I had never been before. The bread basket on our table contained a a very superior freshly-baked carrot [...]