A lovely surprise awaited me when I played at the Brunton Theatre on Tuesday. Sitting in the front row was my first piano teacher, Gordon Lindsay (‘Mr Lindsay’, as I knew him). He taught me from when I began piano lessons at the age of seven until I was nine or ten. Since then, apart […]

I haven’t yet seen the movie ‘LaLa Land’ (it doesn’t open in the UK until tomorrow). But I enjoyed hearing BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ item this morning on how Ryan Gosling, who plays a struggling jazz musician in the film, learned to play the piano for it. He does all the piano playing in the […]

Clearing out old files this week I came across an article called ‘A Talk with Gyorgy Sebok’, from a 1976 edition of Piano Quarterly. It was an interview of the Hungarian piano guru Gyorgy Sebok by a colleague, pianist Seth Carlin. Sebok taught in Indiana University; Carlin at Washington University in St Louis. Alas, neither […]

In today’s Guardian I have a letter which aroused quite a lot of interest when it appeared online yesterday. Please share it if you agree. Here’s what I said: ‘Much of the recent discourse around classical music and its troubles has contained a subtext of glee at the notion that a privileged class is getting […]

BBC Young Musician is underway on BBC4, and once again the talent and accomplishment of the young players is absolutely admirable. To watch and listen to them is inspiring and gives one great hope for the next generation of classical musicians. Having said that, I am still vexed by the way that the collaborative pianists are […]