We have a pair of resident blackbirds in our garden, and every day the male blackbird perches on the chimney and sings loudly, especially at dusk. He seems to have several ‘songs’ or sequences of phrases which he sings over and over. I’ve heard them hundreds of times, but although I’m a musician and quite [...]

An interesting discussion with students about whether it’s right to ‘scale things up’ to 21st century tastes when playing 18th/19th century music. They had played Beethoven so powerfully and with such speed and ringing ‘attack’ that I found myself wondering whether they had converted the music into something that would have startled the composer. I [...]

To Cambridge, where I heard a fine May Week concert at King’s College. (As Clive James pointed out in the title of a book of memoirs, May Week is in June.) It was great to hear that the tradition of excellent music-making continues, even though ‘performance’ is only a small part of the students’ degree [...]

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the jury’s deliberations on the Cardiff Singer of the World final on Sunday night. I’d watched most of the other rounds and had realised it was going to be a difficult choice. It was an exceptionally good line-up, and each one of the [...]

After I had finished my rehearsal in Rye Church in East Sussex the other day, I was standing outside the church waiting for the rain to stop, and my eye fell on the War Memorial commemorating local men who had given their lives in the World Wars of 1914-19 and 1939-45.
What evocative surnames some of [...]