I’m back from the 26th annual festival of the Gaudier Ensemble in Dorset. Over the years this gathering of chamber music specialists from around Europe has come to feel quite special. As our lives have become increasingly complicated, it feels remarkable that each year the same people are able to find a week to converge […]

This morning there was a discussion on Radio 4 about the response of the arts in the UK to the Brexit vote. Contributors rightly said that there is much we can and must do to understand who we are, what are the social issues facing us, how can we forge a constructive identity in the […]

In today’s Guardian I have a letter which aroused quite a lot of interest when it appeared online yesterday. Please share it if you agree. Here’s what I said: ‘Much of the recent discourse around classical music and its troubles has contained a subtext of glee at the notion that a privileged class is getting […]

Last week I was in Rome, where I walked into a church one day to hear a group of about twenty nuns chanting an evening service. (I say ‘chanting’ because it wasn’t exactly singing, nor was it exactly speaking, but some melodious hybrid of the two.) There was a small group at the front who sang […]

An exciting week lies ahead, with a whole cluster of works – nine, in fact – to perform in the space of four days. I’m doing a residency with the wonderful period-instrument quartet, Quatuor Mosaiques, in Perth Concert Hall (in Scotland, before any Australians start calling the wrong hall for tickets. It has happened!) The Quatuor Mosaiques […]