One of my summer projects has been to learn all the Chopin Nocturnes. Strangely enough I have never tackled them properly, and some of them, it turns out, I hardly knew even by ear. Getting to know them has given me tremendous respect for Chopin’s compositional skills as well as his genius for piano writing. […]

Last night I was on the BBC Radio 4 arts programme Front Row, taking part in a discussion about playing from memory. Presenter Stig Abell spoke to me and Torun Saeter Stavseng, principal cellist of the Aurora Orchestra, who are about to perform Shostakovich’s 9th Symphony from memory at The Proms. Listen to the Front […]

I’m just back from a week at the Gaudier Ensemble’s annual Cerne Abbas Music Festival in Dorset – my 25th year at the festival, I think. Some of the core players have been doing it for 28 years! But there are always new players and guest players, and this year we had the fabulous wind […]

I have been practising a lot of Schumann’s music lately in preparation for various music festivals over the summer. It’s always a pleasure to play Schumann and when you play a lot of different compositions, you get really into his way of thinking. His mindset feels unstable, or shall I say ‘stably unstable’. His moods […]

I was away at the time of BBC Young Musician but have been catching up with the final instalments. As usual, I was tremendously impressed with the standard of playing in every instrumental category. Really, did my colleagues and I play as well as that when we were their age? I doubt it. Each time […]