Over the years I’ve acquired various bits of piano music as gifts when friends were throwing away stuff they never played. That’s how I came to have Edward MacDowell’s Woodland Sketches. Most people know the first number, ‘To a Wild Rose’, but the rest of the set is obscure, at least here in the UK. […]

If you google the ‘Minute’ Waltz, you’ll find that it is a ‘song by Arthur Rubinstein’, which would have come as a surprise to Frédéric Chopin. In the UK the waltz (in D flat, opus 64 no 1) is famous because it’s the signature tune of the long-running BBC radio show ‘Just a Minute’, a […]

I asked my husband if he knew Albeniz’s Suite Española. ‘Some of it’, he said. Well, exactly. Some of the pieces in this Suite are popular – in versions for guitar or orchestra as well as the piano originals – but some are much less well known, as I realised when I sat down with […]

This is the second in my series about exploring some of the piano music I have neglected on my shelves. Today’s discovery is Schubert – in particular, the realisation that he wasn’t always the effortless master he became! I sat down to play through his early piano sonatas, which are not often part of recital […]

The coronavirus situation is constantly changing. Many people’s plans have already been impacted by it, even though in Scotland, where I live, there are just a few cases at the moment. In the past few days I’ve had several worried concert promoters on the phone about upcoming concerts. They are naturally concerned about the well-being […]