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 […]

I’ve just returned from the Gaudier Ensemble’s annual festival at Cerne Abbas in Dorset (photo: the last piece of the final concert – the Dvorak piano quintet with (L to R) Marieke Blankestejn, Ulrike Janssen, me, Iris Juda and Henrik Brendstrup). One of the pleasures of the festival is seeing the same people year after […]

Sad news on New Year’s Day. The very fine German cellist Christoph Marks has died unexpectedly of heart failure. Christoph (on the right of the photo) was the principal cello of the NDR Radiophilharmonie in Hannover, but we in Britain knew him best as principal cello of the Gaudier Ensemble with whom he played for […]

Clearing out old files this week I came across an article called ‘A Talk with Gyorgy Sebok’, from a 1976 edition of Piano Quarterly. It was an interview of the Hungarian piano guru Gyorgy Sebok by a colleague, pianist Seth Carlin. Sebok taught in Indiana University; Carlin at Washington University in St Louis. Alas, neither […]