In November, my trio is giving the premiere of a new work which has been written for us – is being written for us, I should say – by Huw Watkins. Earlier in the summer I pestered Huw to let me have what he’d written so far, and though the parts aren’t fully finished yet, he […]

It’s now a week since the Florestan Festival ended, and lots of people have been kind enough to write and say what they thought of it. One thing is very interesting: there’s enormous variety in what people enjoyed best. Some relished the things which were new for them, others treasured the old. Some liked things […]

We’re just back from the Florestan Festival at Peasmarsh. What an extraordinary thing a festival is. A few hours before the first concert, the church is completely quiet, the country lanes are empty, and you can’t imagine that anyone will really come. You finish the rehearsal feeling almost despondent. All those weeks and months of […]

Just back from a successful trip to the Echternach Festival in Luxembourg. We played in a very pretty but wildly over-resonant church whose acoustics were only somewhat subdued by the presence of the audience. During the rehearsal, when the church was empty, we counted a five-second echo. Nevertheless the audience for our concert was extremely warm […]

One of the pieces we’re playing in Luxembourg tonight is a piano trio arrangement of Janacek’s first string quartet, known as ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ after a short story by Tolstoy. The story recounts how the narrator becomes jealous of his wife after she forms a musical partnership with a violinist, and in a fit of […]