I have just been reading an astonishing little book which a friend lent me  –  The Death of Franz Liszt, based on the unpublished diary of his pupil Lina Schmalhausen (Cornell University Press, 2002). The distinguished Liszt biographer Alan Walker came across Lina’s unpublished diary in a Weimar archive when researching the first volume of […]

I have been following – online – the Van Cliburn piano competition which takes place every four years in Fort Worth, Texas. As well as being one of the world’s most prestigious it must be the most generous, with an array of prizes and offers of management, concert bookings, recording opportunities, media training, financial training, […]

I have been listening to various recordings of Mozart’s K488 piano concerto made by pianists in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. In all of them, as if by some strange consensus, the slow movement is taken very slowly. It seems to have been a fashion back then to treat Mozart Adagios as very slow. As […]

I’m currently practising Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A major K488 for a performance with the New Edinburgh Orchestra on June 25 (please come along if you live nearby!) Mozart’s glorious A major concerto is still probably my favourite (apart from all my other favourite Mozart concertos). It was the first concerto I ever learned, and […]

The other week I was visiting relatives in the south of England, and we went to the coast for an outing. The beach was covered in stones of attractive pink, white and russet colours, and as usual I found myself searching among the stones for examples of rounded ones. It’s always seemed unlikely to me […]