Melvyn Bragg’s excellent Radio 4 Series on ‘culture’ has been a thought-provoking companion every morning this week. Various guests on the programme, talking about ‘high art’, have commented that older forms of music have been overtaken and overshadowed by the vast popularity of pop. While some speakers have advised that the treasury of classical music [...]

I always rather dread this time of year, when cold weather makes my hands feel stiff. Before sitting down to play the piano, I often have to run a basin of warm water and stand with my hands in the water for a few minutes. My piano stands next to an unused fireplace. No matter [...]

Yesterday I was at the Guildhall School of Music. The Guildhall School must have the most thoroughly urban location of any of the London music colleges, secreted as it is within a forest of City skyscrapers so closely packed and so overwhelmingly monochrome that the effect is quite intimidating. There’s nowhere in London I’m so [...]

Winter weather has suddenly arrived in London. There is ice on the smaller ponds frost on the bushes, and low winter sunshine striking dramatically through the trees. This week Erich Hoebarth and I – me in London and him in Vienna – are trying to go through all the ‘live’ recordings that were made of [...]

Erich Höbarth and I are travelling down to Bath today to prepare for our concert in the Mozartfest on Saturday morning. Our programme is all of Mozart, interspersing duo sonatas with piano solos, but it’s a different programme to the all-Mozart one we played in the Wigmore Hall in September. Of course, with several dozen [...]