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 […]

A doctor friend has sent me an excerpt from the current edition of the British Medical Journal in which their writer ‘Minerva’ reports: ‘Great composers have tended to die young, but great performing musicians often carry on getting better as they get older. An article in PLOS One (2013 doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0071630) asks whether older professional […]

At the weekend I went to watch a tango club at which an old friend of mine teaches. I know nothing about tango, though I’ve been to a few Argentine tango shows in London, and recently I had a lot of fun playing in a late-night performance of some Piazzolla tangos. After watching the tango […]