My 2010 book Out of Silence has received a decade-late review in American Record Guide – in the nicest possible way. Their reviewer Bruno Repp had written a long article about lesser-known piano music he thought readers would enjoy discovering. He ended with this item: ‘I would like to conclude by recommending a book. But […]

This week I’ve been trying to find out what happened to the album of Mozart piano and violin sonatas that the wonderful Viennese violinist Erich Höbarth and I made in 2012. (That’s us in the photo.) It was compiled from live recordings of a concert series we performed in Perth Concert Hall in Scotland. That […]

The other day I read a review in The Guardian of a book, ‘In Good Hands’, by conductor Alice Farnham, about the art and craft of conducting. I haven’t read the book, but I was struck by several phrases the reviewer, Caroline Crampton, used when talking about classical music: The conductor stands ‘with their back […]

BBC Radio 3’s ‘Record Review’ programme this morning contained a ‘Building a Library’ feature on the Ravel Trio. Reviewer Jeremy Sams, a well-known Francophile, compared the available recordings. Mentioning the enormous technical difficulty of all three instrumental parts, he quoted Ravel as having said that he loved the fact that it was difficult because it […]

Readers of my books might like to see a couple of mentions which have popped up recently in the US. The first is in the New York publication The Browser, whose mission is to send its subscribers a daily selection of good writing from around the world. Editor Robert Cottrell writes an extensive thinkpiece each […]