It’s a great moment in our household because my husband Robert Philip’s epic study of orchestral music is about to be published by Yale University Press. Pre-ordered copies have started to land on people’s doormats, probably with a thud. The Classical Music Lover’s Companion to Orchestral Music has been thirteen years in the writing. At […]

This week I’m preparing for the last of my lecture-recital series in The Brunton Theatre in Musselburgh. On Saturday afternoon I’ll be speaking about – and performing – Schubert’s late A major piano sonata, one of the masterpieces of his last year. These lecture-recitals have brought out a different sort of audience, perhaps one which […]

On a walk today I found myself passing the ice skating rink (‘the coolest place in town!’) where my late father was a devoted member of the skating club for about fifty years. He went every Saturday evening and every Sunday afternoon. We children tried ice skating as well, but were not as taken by […]

I have a new book, Speaking the Piano, due out in June from Boydell Press. My previous four books are about performance. This new one is about my experiences of learning and teaching (though performance sneaks in too). The title was inspired by a remark of Artur Schnabel’s teacher, Leschetitzky, to the effect that he […]

My piano, which I’ve had for almost thirty years, has just come back from a six-month trip to be renovated by Steinway in London. Before you ask, I wasn’t without a piano for the whole of that time: they kindly lent me a very nice Steinway ‘B’ grand to tide me over. The main reason […]