What a pleasure to hear the John Wilson Orchestra in their Rodgers and Hammerstein Prom, which I heard on television. John Wilson’s arrangements are simply spellbinding. His hand-picked orchestra, with many individually distinguished musicians playing in it, reminded me of the old joke that ‘the ideal orchestra would have Jascha Heifetz as its leader.’ ‘No, […]

Today’s Independent newspaper has a review of new books on music, with several paragraphs devoted to mine. Click here if you’d like to read the article by the Independent’s literary editor Boyd Tonkin.

Richard Osborne devotes a large part of his Music column in ‘The Oldie’ magazine (Summer 2010) to my new book. As I don’t have a picture of the magazine I’ve chosen instead an illustration of an real oldie, one of the 700-year-old oaks in Richmond Park. Richard Osborne writes in The Oldie: ‘Pianist and five-star essayist […]

Two more reviews of my book ‘Out of Silence’ have appeared. As neither is online, here’s a glimpse of what they said: ‘In my experience, highly gifted musicians often find it extremely difficult to articulate their ideas about music and reveal the secrets of their craft through writing. Not so Susan Tomes. Her latest book, […]

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 […]