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: earnest, determined, slightly obsessed.

What I like about this group of students is that most of them do something completely different for their day jobs. Just a few are full-time music students, but others are doctors, lawyers, journalists, psychiatrists, editors, and there’s even an aerospace engineer. I’m so used to being surrounded by people whose main occupation is music that I find it very refreshing to be in the company of people who are experts in other things, but have kept piano-playing as a hobby which means a great deal to them. In some ways I find I envy them!

Violinist Gidon Kremer has, I hope, set the cat among the pigeons with his decision to pull out of the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. His letter of explanation is long and somewhat rambling, but perhaps he did not have the time to make it shorter. In any case, his exasperation with today’s music world is clear, and many people will agree with him. I hope his outburst will start a constructive debate. Here’s an extract from his letter to the director of the festival:

‘I simply do not want to breathe the air which is filled by sensationalism and distorted values. Let’s admit – all of us have something to do with the poisonous development of our music world, in which “stars” count more than creativity, ratings more than genuine talent, numbers more than sounds.…I simply do not have enough energy to support gatherings and collaborations on highly exposed stages with “rising” or approved stars of today’s music business for the sake of ovations and name-dropping.

…A time has now come in which the overall devaluation of the word “interpreter” has resulted in a misguided fixation with glamour and sex appeal….This is not anymore “my” time. I leave it to those who believe in it, be it the audiences or the new breed of performers, who have overwhelming capacities to please crowds, but who are often themselves quite EMPTY and artistically lost, chasing a hunger for recognition over ability.’

To the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, where the first thing one sees is ‘Work no 998’ by Martin Creed, four chairs balanced on top of one another in a tapering pile, an orange office chair at the bottom, a child’s formica chair at the top. This is the kind of thing which makes me feel I have become an old fuddy-duddy. I look at it and can’t see anything more than the barest of ideas. The explanatory plaque on the wall said, ‘Four chairs are balanced on top of each other as they ascend towards the ceiling, asserting their defiance while struggling to avoid collapse.’ Indeed? I could feel ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’-style letters to newspapers writing themselves in my head.

When I came back through the room a bit later, an RA ‘interpreter’ was showing ‘Work no 998’ to a group of children and teachers. ‘What skills do you need to make this?’ he was asking. There was a longish silence. Someone said, ‘Imagination?’ ‘Yes!’ said the interpreter. ‘Balance?’ ‘Yes!’ Another pause. ‘Cheek?’ said someone. ‘Yes, cheek! I think cheek is very important!’ beamed the interpreter. ‘This work is by a very famous artist, a famous minimalist artist’, he told them. ‘What’s minimalist?’ someone asked. ‘The artist is interested in how little you have to do to make art’, said the interpreter. The children looked intrigued. ‘What do you guess is the price of this work of art?’ Everyone knew this was a trick question, so they just giggled and whispered to each other. ‘Sixty thousand pounds!’ said the interpreter triumphantly. ‘What do you think of that?!’ And they all went off to make things from egg boxes and tissue paper. It does, as they say, make one think.

An interesting discussion with the NZ Trio who are visiting London this week from their native New Zealand. We were talking about the challenge of performing some of the very long works in the trio repertoire, such as the Schubert trios (40-50 minutes). Many of our standard three- or four-movement works are 30 minutes long. In contrast, many contemporary works for piano trio (of which the NZ Trio have a lot in their repertoire) are shorter and more immediate in character – often spiky, upbeat, energetic, jazzy and striking. After concerts, audiences often comment on these pieces rather than on the longer classics. But what does this mean? We talked about that in the context of a society where we’ve all got used to music of ’soundbite’ length. There are so many competing claims for our attention all day long. There’s a feeling that only something of clearly-defined character, something possible to grasp immediately, has a chance of cutting through the clamour. On the other hand, most musicians are chiefly interested in presenting the longer works that they mull over for ages and have loved for years. These works, by Beethoven and Schubert and Schumann and so on, don’t yield their secrets immediately and are not easy to sum up in a post-concert chat. Perhaps that’s why people don’t try. But the fact that they choose to comment on the cheerful nuggets of modern music probably doesn’t mean that they were indifferent to the lovely longer works of the past, just that these works don’t lend themselves to soundbites of comment.

To the First Night of the Proms last night, courtesy of some kind friends who had rented a box in the Royal Albert Hall. Benjamin Grosvenor, an excellent young British pianist who has only just turned 19, played Liszt’s second piano concerto with great finesse and composure. Alas, the famously difficult acoustics of the Albert Hall withheld some of the detail from me, but just watching the pianist’s clever hands was illuminating.

Less enjoyable was the large BBC camera, with cameraman seated at it, which spent the evening gliding rapidly across the stalls between the front row of the audience and the orchestra. During the piano concerto I was particularly aware of it because the pianist was seated so close to the edge of the stage, and I couldn’t help imagining how that large TV camera must be looming in and out of his peripheral vision as it sped to and fro, sometimes swinging round to focus on his hands. I wondered whether the pianist had known in advance that there would be such a distraction, and whether he had had any chance to practise getting used to it before the concert. At the interval, talk was as much about the camera as about the performance, surely a sign that the camerawork was intrusive.