I’ve been taking sneaky breaks from other tasks to watch the Winter Olympics from Sochi. This is partly in homage to my Dad, a keen skater, who imparted to the wider family a love of figure skating and ice dancing which still gets us gathering round televisions whenever there’s some good skating to watch. And […]

On Saturday I’m giving this year’s Malcolm Bowie Memorial Lecture for the British Comparative Literature Association. My subject is ‘Music and memory – a musician’s perspective’. The lecture is free and open to the public. It takes place at 3pm in Deptford Town Hall in London on 25 January and will last for around an […]

Friends in America have alerted me to an interesting article in the New York Times of 31 December 2013: ‘Maestro at Work: Hold That Cough’. Written by NY Times music critic Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, it’s about the tickly – sorry, tricky – issue of coughing in concerts. In the fourth paragraph she quotes from one […]

The BBC2 series ‘Masterchef‘ has come to an end with Steven Edwards winning the title. One of the competitors’ final tasks was to cook for a roomful of distinguished chefs, well known from Michelin-starred restaurants around the UK. This is always a fascinating event, partly because of the way these leading chefs talk about food. […]

I’ve been practising Schumann’s ‘Papillons’, a cycle of piano pieces containing various motifs and references which reappear in his later piano music. It seems that for Schumann, butterflies were associated with the novels of Jean Paul, one of his favourite authors, who often wrote about the soul’s struggle to resolve its identity. In fact, the […]