A curious thing happened at a concert of mine last week. We had rehearsed in the afternoon (piano plus string quartet) and when everyone was comfortable with the positions of their chairs and instruments, we marked up the stage with various colours of sticky tape so that the backstage team knew where to put everything in the [...]

I played a piano recital the other evening at the home of some friends. It was a lovely evening, and behind the piano, the French doors were wide open to the garden.
About ten minutes from the end of my recital, as I was sailing full steam ahead with the final piece, a black kitten wandered [...]

This is my 200th blog post! Here’s a photo of me playing for an invited audience recently in someone’s private home. I really like playing (and also going to hear) house concerts, which feel like a variant on the ‘salons’ of previous centuries.
Understandably, such house concerts are usually a money-free zone for all concerned. But since I enjoy playing [...]

Our cat’s preferred brand of catfood has a disarming slogan: ‘As good as it looks’.  The layers of meaning quiver in front of your eyes almost as much as the meaty jelly does when you spoon it out. Obviously, ‘as good as it looks’ is meant to put positive thoughts in your head about the catfood, but it has [...]

After rejoicing that the BBC had improved its ‘Young Musician of the Year’ coverage so markedly in 2010, I had to grind my teeth with annoyance as I watched the ‘Eurovision Young Musicians 2010’ competition on BBC4 this evening. The young musicians were tremendous, but the presentation was horribly bland. Fifteen semi-finalists were whittled down to seven [...]