There's a lovely review of my Nocturne book in the US journal First Things, 'America's leading journal of religious and public life'. In case you don't come across it, here's an excerpt: 'Tomes is the author of eight books on classical music, and the elegant,...
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I've been re-reading the great James Thurber's The Years with Ross, an account of the time he spent working for the New Yorker magazine in the 1920s, 30s and 40s under its founder and chief editor, Harold Ross. It's a joyously detailed and entertaining account of the...
I mentioned a couple of days ago that my book was about to be published in the US. This morning I was delighted to find a generous review in the Wall Street Journal (see photo), headed 'Musical Light in the Darkness'. The link is this, but after a couple of paragraphs...
At a book sale at the weekend I picked up a copy of Heinrich Neuhaus's book The Art of Piano Playing. Neuhaus, who devoted the main part of his career to teaching at the Moscow Conservatory, was the teacher of Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels and Radu Lupu among...
My 2010 book Out of Silence has received a decade-late review in American Record Guide - in the nicest possible way. Their reviewer Bruno Repp had written a long article about lesser-known piano music he thought readers would enjoy discovering. He ended with this...
The other day I read a review in The Guardian of a book, 'In Good Hands', by conductor Alice Farnham, about the art and craft of conducting. I haven't read the book, but I was struck by several phrases the reviewer, Caroline Crampton, used when talking about classical...
Last December my blog post about my favourite books of 2021 was quite popular, so here's another round-up of the best books I read in 2022. Once again it turns out that I read over fifty books, but some were re-readings, which either does or doesn't count, depending...
This week marks the official publication date of the paperback edition of my Yale University Press book The Piano - a History in 100 Pieces, but as usually seems to be the way, copies seem to have been circulating for a while already. At least, at my Cambridge recital...
I'm preparing for a solo recital at Kettle's Yard museum in Cambridge on November 24th. Kettle's Yard is a beautiful little museum which began in the 1950s as a personal art collection by Jim Ede, who used his own house as the display venue. It was the first gallery I...
I've been reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Memories and Portraits, published in 1887. RLS, as he's often referred to, is famous for Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and a few others, though in my local library the collected edition...
On Saturday, I appeared at the Wigtown Book Festival in Dumfries and Galloway in the west of Scotland (see photo of me being interviewed by Stuart Kelly). Wigtown is Scotland's 'national book town', boasting an astonishing number of bookshops for a small town which is...
After managing to avoid Covid for two and a half years, I have now come down with it. It hasn't been fun - suffice it to say I'm very glad I didn't get the virus until I was fully vaccinated. While staying out of everyone's way, I have had the chance to read. My...
Hearing of the death of renowned theatre director Peter Brook, I went back to my book Beyond the Notes in which I described going to Paris in 1982 to ask his advice about how to keep our chamber music group Domus alive and in good heart despite the many difficulties...
I have just been reading an astonishing little book which a friend lent me - The Death of Franz Liszt, based on the unpublished diary of his pupil Lina Schmalhausen (Cornell University Press, 2002). The distinguished Liszt biographer Alan Walker came across Lina's...
Readers of my books might like to see a couple of mentions which have popped up recently in the US. The first is in the New York publication The Browser, whose mission is to send its subscribers a daily selection of good writing from around the world. Editor Robert...