Last week I had to empty my shelves of piano music so that the room could be painted. It took ages and resulted in tottering piles of sheet music on the floor of other rooms. As I carried armfuls of music to and fro, I reflected on how much effort had gone into acquiring all [...]

How nice it is to work with young musicians at that interesting crossroads when they’re emerging from higher education and developing their own identities as professional musicians. They are no longer dependent on teachers (sometimes they no longer have access to teachers), and they have ideas of their own, but are still open to hearing [...]

One afternoon in Vienna we went out to visit the place where Mozart was buried, in the Sankt Marx cemetery outside the old city walls. Today the burial ground, no longer used since the 1880s, lies forlornly in the midst of motorway flyovers, housing estates, industrial warehouses and a mobile phone headquarters. It’s an ugly [...]

I’m off to Vienna to rehearse four programmes of Mozart’s music which violinist Erich Höbarth and I are playing this season in Perth Concert Hall, Scotland’s newest concert hall (our first concert is on November 11). We’re tackling twelve of Mozart’s sonatas for piano and violin.
Piano and violin, I hear you say? Isn’t it ‘violin [...]

To a talk at the Guildhall School of Music about musicians’ injuries. ‘Suffering for their Art’, presented by Helen Reid, explored the complex topic of how performers deal with injuries which prevent them from playing their instruments. It seems that musicians are notoriously reluctant to speak openly about their injuries. Playing is so bound up [...]