Recently, at a Zoom meeting of my piano club, one of our members played Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Petite Suite de Concert. It was new to most of us, but we were all struck by its charm. I remember being puzzled when I first heard of a composer called Samuel Coleridge Taylor. Wasn’t that the name of […]

Zoom music-making has been a feature of lockdown. Hardly a week passes without someone sending me a link to a recording:  Zoom choirs, Zoom orchestras and ensembles, each performer singing or playing away in their own home and on their own little screen. To create a composite whole, each person usually has to record their […]

We’re hearing a lot about the days of heedless international travel being over for classical musicians. In today’s Guardian, Charlotte Higgins does an admirable job of summing up some aspects of the situation. It’s worth remembering that darting about to play in San Francisco one night and Frankfurt the next is quite a recent thing. […]

Here’s a neglected piece! Years ago, ‘Rustle of Spring’ was a favourite with amateur pianists, often of the older generation – ‘Uncle So-and-So’s party piece’, to be trotted out (possibly in abridged form) at parties. But I haven’t seen it on a concert programme for ages. For something so virtuosic-sounding, some of its pages are […]

The other night, after watching the last in the category finals of ‘BBC Young Musician’, I tweeted that I had now watched the wind, brass and string finals and had not once heard them mention the name of any of the pianists who played with the young competitors. My tweet attracted a (for me) high […]