There was an article in The Guardian this week about the dwindling number of highly-trained piano tuners in Australia. Not only is the pool of piano tuners getting smaller, it is in danger of not being replenished because there aren’t enough training courses in this highly-skilled craft. Already, tuners are covering enormous distances to reach […]

Hyperion Records, which was recently bought by Universal, has decided to make its catalogue of recordings available on streaming platforms for the first time. The first batch of 200 Hyperion recordings has just gone up on Apple Music, Spotify, iTunes and so on. As the Hyperion catalogue is very large, it will be released in […]

The Coronation of King Charles III came in the same week that we heard the organisation Psappha, which promotes new music, had been forced to close because of funding problems. This in itself followed hard on the heels of threats to close the BBC Singers and reduce the size of BBC Orchestras by 20%. The […]

Talk of how people are going to watch the King’s Coronation next week has reminded me of my father’s tale about Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation in 1953. My father had recently moved to Scotland to marry my Scottish mother. Before coming to Edinburgh, my dad had been apprenticed to Mr Jolly, who started out as a […]

This weekend I heard that my old friend Gerald Pointon had died. I felt like writing this little reminiscence. Gerald was a high-powered lawyer in Paris, specialising in arbitration. As a graduate student at Cambridge University he had sung in the famous choir of King’s College for a period of time, I forget how long. […]