I did an interview yesterday with Australian Radio’s ‘The Music Show’, hosted by composer Andrew Ford for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It was broadcast in Australia a few hours ago and is now available via their website for downloading or to listen online. If you’d like to listen, or to read more about it, click here.

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 Greening’s review:

‘Tomes has a particular understanding of humanity rare in writing about music. She has indeed looked ‘beyond the notes’ and seen how the world perceives musicians.’

Click here if you’d like to read the whole review on the  ‘Out of Silence’ section of the Book Reviews page.

Read the blog via email: now you can sign up to have new blog posts delivered to your email inbox, and as always, you can also subscribe via RSS. You’ll find these options in the left-hand column under the Search box.

Plus, if you’ve written a comment on a blog post, you can also now tick a box to follow any further comments on the same post. You’ll find this option under the comments box. You will be notified by email if there were any other comments on the same post.

Some readers have confessed that they never find the comment box or the comments, so here’s how: click on the title of any blog post, and you will be taken to that post’s own page, with comments shown under the post, and a ’Leave a Reply’ box for you to type your own comment in. Or click on the blue italic ’comments’ option under the title of any blog post to get the same result.

This is my 200th blog post! Here’s a photo of me playing for an invited audience recently in someone’s private home. I really like playing (and also going to hear) house concerts, which feel like a variant on the ‘salons’ of previous centuries.

Understandably, such house concerts are usually a money-free zone for all concerned. But since I enjoy playing in intimate settings, I’ve often wondered if I could set about creating more such concerts and even make income from them. From time to time I read about people in other fields who’ve done similar things. There are ‘private dining clubs’ where foodies gather to eat in private homes, their addresses kept secret until the last minute. Guests get to meet fellow foodies and eat well in a relaxed domestic setting, for less (or not more) than they’d pay in a restaurant, and the cook makes a reasonable profit. I’ve also read about a few musicians, though not in the classical world, who’ve set up ‘tours of people’s living-rooms’. One example is the Canadian singer Jane Siberry whose inventive approach to touring was the subject of a recent Globe and Mail feature.

But when I imagine setting up such a tour for myself, I can’t quite get my head round the potential problems (one of which is the piano). Once you start advertising your events or charging for tickets, you enter a different zone, one bristling with public liability issues. There’s also the important issue of privacy for the person hosting the concert. You’d want to have some control over who was allowed in to the house.  But on the other hand you wouldn’t want to burden each host with the task of gathering up 30 acceptable customers. Is there a way round these problems?

Our cat’s preferred brand of catfood has a disarming slogan: ‘As good as it looks’.  The layers of meaning quiver in front of your eyes almost as much as the meaty jelly does when you spoon it out. Obviously, ‘as good as it looks’ is meant to put positive thoughts in your head about the catfood, but it has the ring of accidental truth-telling.

It reminds me of a wonderful remark variously attributed to American author Mark Twain or to his contemporary, humorist Edgar Wilson Nye, about the music of Wagner: ‘Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.’ Like all the best observations, you can savour it for ages without it losing its bite.