An exciting moment this afternoon: a friend called to say that he’d just read a review – the first one, in fact – of my new book in the Times Literary Supplement. I couldn’t find it online, so I ran down the road to the newsagent’s to buy a hard copy. Here’s a snippet of John […]

A kind person at International Piano magazine has sent me, without comment, a copy of the May/June issue. It turns out to have a survey of recordings of Haydn’s ‘Gypsy Rondo’ piano trio. ‘The Florestan Trio … displays uncommon musical intelligence while refusing to allow any hint of sentimentality of any over-indulgence in the finale. […]

On Saturday we attended the last night of Mark Morris Dance Group performing ‘L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed il Moderato’ at the Coliseum. Readers will remember that Mark Morris is a hero of mine. Dance critics were in raptures about this show, but I still think that Mark Morris’s choreography is a special treat for musicians. […]

A nice surprise today: Bob came back from a meeting with a magazine page brought along by a colleague. It was from the February issue of the leading French record magazine Diapason, one of whose editors had taken the new Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music as the subject of his editorial. The Cambridge Companion, an […]

A most unexpected and heartwarming New Year gift arrived today in the form of a comment made in a Times book review by the distinguished cellist Natalie Clein. Reviewing a new book on Bach’s cello suites, she muses on the difficulty of writing about music, and says, ‘The most successful writers are often musicians themselves […]