I’m teaching on a lovely summer course for pianists in the south of France. As I write, people are practising in the rooms all around me – everything from Schumann’s Fantasy to Beethoven’s opus 110, Debussy Preludes and Liszt’s Vallée d’Obermann. Put together, we sound like Saint-Saens’s vision of ‘Pianistes’ in his Carnival of the Animals: [...]

To the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, where the first thing one sees is ‘Work no 998’ by Martin Creed, four chairs balanced on top of one another in a tapering pile, an orange office chair at the bottom, a child’s formica chair at the top. This is the kind of thing which makes me feel [...]

An interesting discussion with the NZ Trio who are visiting London this week from their native New Zealand. We were talking about the challenge of performing some of the very long works in the trio repertoire, such as the Schubert trios (40-50 minutes). Many of our standard three- or four-movement works are 30 minutes long. In [...]

At a Gaudier Ensemble rehearsal last week my colleagues, who come from various European countries, were discussing the unstoppable rise in pitch. Here in England we still tune to A=440 Hz, which has been ‘standard pitch’ since the mid-twentieth-century, though in the rest of Europe standard pitch has gradually become somewhat higher, at A=444 or [...]

This morning in the village church of Cerne Abbas, we invited the children of the local primary school to come and listen to a rehearsal of Aaron Copland’s attractive piece, Appalachian Spring (part of tonight’s concert programme). It lasts around 25 minutes, quite a long while for young children to sit quietly, which they did. [...]