I was complaining last week to a fellow musician about the difficulty of getting students to reply to emails. ‘You’d think they would reply to email precisely because it’s so easy to click on ‘reply’ and write a few words’, I said. ‘I have exactly the same problem’, he said. ‘I think it’s because a […]

For over a year I’ve enjoyed contributing weather-related photos to the Guardian newspaper via their ‘Witness‘ site, which invited readers to send in images that captured the ‘feel’ of the month. Several times I’ve been lucky enough to have one of my photos chosen by the editor to be published in the print newspaper. Whenever […]

One of my summer projects has been to learn all the Chopin Nocturnes. Strangely enough I have never tackled them properly, and some of them, it turns out, I hardly knew even by ear. Getting to know them has given me tremendous respect for Chopin’s compositional skills as well as his genius for piano writing. […]

I have been practising a lot of Schumann’s music lately in preparation for various music festivals over the summer. It’s always a pleasure to play Schumann and when you play a lot of different compositions, you get really into his way of thinking. His mindset feels unstable, or shall I say ‘stably unstable’. His moods […]

Tomorrow I’m off to France to spend a week on the jury of the Lyon International Chamber Music Competition. This year the competition is for piano trio – the classic combination of piano, violin and cello. From time to time I come across people who think -very reasonably – that ‘a piano trio’ must consist […]