The Ambialet piano course ended last night with concerts by the participants (see some of them in the photo). It never ceases to amaze me how people manage to raise their game in these circumstances, even though most of them find it a nerve-racking experience and dread it beforehand. Every single person played the best [...]

An interesting conversation at lunch today about choosing music as a career despite the misgivings of one’s parents. Everyone at the summer school had had some form of The Conversation about whether music was an acceptable profession. Many recalled that they were strongly encouraged in their musical endeavours right up to the point where they [...]

I’m teaching on a lovely summer course for pianists in the south of France. As I write, people are practising in the rooms all around me – everything from Schumann’s Fantasy to Beethoven’s opus 110, Debussy Preludes and Liszt’s Vallée d’Obermann. Put together, we sound like Saint-Saens’s vision of ‘Pianistes’ in his Carnival of the Animals: [...]

At a Gaudier Ensemble rehearsal last week my colleagues, who come from various European countries, were discussing the unstoppable rise in pitch. Here in England we still tune to A=440 Hz, which has been ‘standard pitch’ since the mid-twentieth-century, though in the rest of Europe standard pitch has gradually become somewhat higher, at A=444 or [...]

This morning in the village church of Cerne Abbas, we invited the children of the local primary school to come and listen to a rehearsal of Aaron Copland’s attractive piece, Appalachian Spring (part of tonight’s concert programme). It lasts around 25 minutes, quite a long while for young children to sit quietly, which they did. [...]