I spent a long tube journey today reading the newspaper articles and special supplements about tonight’s Champions’ League Final football match between Manchester United and Barcelona. I’m not much of a sports fan, but anything can become interesting once you take the trouble to know something about it, and I can see that in any [...]

Today was a Bank Holiday, but I hardly noticed. To me it was just a valuable practice day in the week leading up to the rehearsal period for the trio’s festival. Next Monday marks the beginning of a ten-day period in which we have to prepare all the pieces we’re playing in eight concerts. Once [...]

This morning we flew back from Berlin. Yesterday’s thunderstorm had been swept away and the sky was a brilliant blue, with hundreds of fluffy white clouds bobbing about beneath us.
Sometimes when travelling by plane, especially on a dull day, the glorious sunshine above the clouds comes as a shock. It’s often crossed my mind  that my [...]

Off early this morning to Heathrow for a concert this evening with the trio in Berlin’s Konzerthaus. We used never to travel somewhere far away on the day of a concert, in case of delays. We’d had one or two nasty experiences which made us conclude that we must always go out on the day before our [...]

Practising Schubert’s E flat trio for a concert tonight, I remembered a delightful moment in a talk Bob gave about Schubert’s chamber music at the Florestan Festival a couple of years ago. He told the audience about the earliest known biography of Schubert, written by Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn, whom Bob described as ‘Schubert’s first [...]