Today there’s an interview with me by Kate Molleson in the Herald, one of Scotland’s leading newspapers. The interview was triggered by the interest in my Mozart Series with violinist Erich Höbarth in Perth Concert Hall. The next concert in the series is on December 14 at 7.30pm.

You can read the Herald interview here.

Since I wrote about attending a masterclass the other day, several people have told me about their own bruising experiences with ‘masters’ who specialised in devastating criticism. Years after the event they could still recall the words with searing clarity:

‘Shall I ask you to try again, or is there no point?’

‘You line the notes up in front of you and shoot them one by one.’

‘Between you and music there is a brick wall forever fixed.’

‘Yours is the sort of playing I’ve spent 25 years of my life trying to stamp out.’

As an occasional teacher myself, I find it distressing that people are so impressed by devastating criticism. Maybe I come from a different tradition; at any rate, I wouldn’t allow myself to say those kind of humiliating things to students. When I’m in the audience at a masterclass I quite often think, ‘Yes, I might have made that same point myself, but I wouldn’t have made it like that, for God’s sake!’  Direct criticism, yes; humorous observations, yes; but not humiliating remarks. As a student I found that mean remarks from a teacher just made me feel very detached and remote. I didn’t respect them more for being horrid to me. Therefore I’m surprised by how many people can somehow persuade themselves that being verbally mauled by ‘a master’ has done them good. They might have been hurt or angry at the time, but they eventually find a way to look back on it and say that it was a transformative experience. At the very least, they come to think that it has enhanced their coping strategies.

For the audience there’s an theatrical frisson to a masterclass in which a student gets savaged. It feels a bit like watching those nature programmes in which a huge aggressive polar bear, rampaging around in a territorial dispute, sits down on a baby bear and crushes it. It’s horrifying but awe-inspiring.

Some ‘masters’ play to the gallery in this respect, courting laughter and the shocked intake of breath. You’d think students on the receiving end of their larger-than-life jibes would hate the teachers for it, but they don’t; there seems to be something in human psychology which makes us feel there is ‘more truth’ in wounding remarks than in the same advice considerately given.

I’ve promised to help promote the Conway Hall Sunday Concerts, where I’m playing a recital on Sunday 4 December at 6.30pm.

Conway Hall (25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, London WC1) is Europe’s longest-running chamber music series, and has been going since 1887. The series has gone through some wobbly patches, partly due to its policy of making tickets affordable for everyone, but the new organisers are determined to pursue this long-running idealistic policy. Even today the price of admission is only £8, or £4 for concessions. Very unusually, you cannot buy tickets in advance – which makes it a slightly nerve-racking experience for all concerned! So please just turn up on the night and come to hear Mozart, Ligeti and Schumann. The start time of 6.30pm is unusual too – but rather a good idea, I think, because it means people can eat afterwards without making it a very late evening.

To King’s Place to hear the Hungarian piano professor Ferenc Rados teach a public masterclass for several chamber groups. I know lots of people who have had memorable lessons with Ferenc Rados in recent years, though I myself hadn’t seen him since I played to him in Prussia Cove quite a few years ago.

Like several of his compatriots, such as Sandor Vegh, Gyorgy Sebok and Gyorgy Kurtag, Rados’s style of teaching is intense, vivid and unpredictable. He speaks very quietly, so in a big hall we all had to strain to hear. He focuses above all on how to make the underlying structure of the music clear. He also talks a lot about how to read the ‘grammar’ of each musical sentence. Today he said that even if a piece of music seems to be in a language we do not yet know, we can still sense whether the shape of a musical sentence is plausible – whether syllables are being articulated, whether there is movement through the sentence, whether there is space to breathe. I don’t know whether this ‘parsing’ of musical phrases works in all types of music (not all music resembles speech, after all), but treating music as if it were a compelling piece of oratory often brings it to life in a very immediate and satisfying way.

His determination to do justice to the music sometimes makes him ruthless towards the performers. This is a very different style of teaching than the one we’re used to here, particularly in our present era of ’supporting the student and bolstering their self-esteem’. Bolstering their self-esteem appears to play no part in the Hungarian method; on the contrary, it often feels (as one of the participants said afterwards) as if the intention is to make them realise how small they are, and what a long way there still is to go. Some people rise wonderfully to the challenge ; others just clam up and turn away. I think most people sense that the focus is on the greatness of the music, not the ego of the performer; that’s as it should be, but it’s asking a lot for young musicians to respond instantly and positively in front of an audience containing their friends, tutors, agents, and competitors.

My favourite moment today was when Rados spoke about the many different ways to play something quietly. ‘You seem to think that ‘piano’ is always something lovely, sweet, tender, melodic, romantic,’ he said to one of the groups. ‘But it can be so many different things. Here, for example, it is a secret fortissimo!’ He chuckled and went on in a low tone, ‘You know, in a Hitchcock movie, the most dangerous words are whispered.’

To Cambridge for a dinner at my old college. In order to check what I wore last year at this event, I looked up some photos I’d taken at the time (just as well, as I was about to wear the same thing) and was surprised to see how much colder it was last year in mid-November. Then, I’d taken photos of oak leaves transformed into frosty sculptures, and of birds standing on the ice. That was just before the big snow which brought the country to a standstill.

A year later, however, people in Cambridge were out in their shirt-sleeves in intense November sunshine. Lots of people were still punting on the river (see photo). The light was particularly beautiful, and I annoyed everyone by stopping to try and capture one poetical scene after another. By the time we got back to London, however, mist had descended; we emerged from the tube into dark wintry wetness which made the Cambridge sunshine seem very far away.

There has been a lot of talk about another harsh winter, but we have a young friend who works in weather forecasting, and he told us that it is impossible to predict the weather accurately more than a few days ahead. Anything else is pure guesswork.