I spent the past couple of days popping in and out of the first round of the Concerto Class held each year by the Edinburgh Music Competition Festival. The Concerto Class is strictly for amateurs; those who get to the final are given the opportunity to play their...
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In today's Guardian I was reading about the Japanese tradition of 'listening bars', where customers have 'a deep, beautiful, reverential attitude to listening to music'. High-end sound systems, sometimes dominating a whole wall, convey every layer of a recorded album...
On Sunday of this week I'll be playing a programme of piano music by historical women pianists at the London International Piano Festival at King's Place. Mine is the closing concert of the festival, at 3pm on 6th October. If you live in or near London, please...
Last Saturday there was a lovely article by Ken Walton in The Scotsman weekend magazine about my upcoming concerts with the Quatuor Mosaiques in Perth, and with Erich Höbarth (pictured with me) in Edinburgh. Here it is for anyone who'd like to read it. For some...
An exciting week lies ahead, with a whole cluster of works - nine, in fact - to perform in the space of four days. I'm doing a residency with the wonderful period-instrument quartet, Quatuor Mosaiques, in Perth Concert Hall (in Scotland, before any Australians start...
Last week I played a lunchtime recital in Aberdeen, the first time I'd played in the city for ages. I took a train early enough to allow me to see sunrise over the Firth of Forth, followed by a spectacular curve around the coastline of Fife as the first light was...
It's hard to keep up with changing perceptions in the world of music. We classical musicians are used to being the butt of complaints that our concerts are off-putting because of their focus on accuracy and daunting accomplishment. Unfortunately there's no way round...
I have been haunted this week by articles about the New York collaboration between 'performance artist' Marina Abramovic and pianist Igor Levit. You can read all about it here. Basically, Marina Abramovic seeks to 'get the audience into a different state of mind' in...
While baking a cake this morning, I listened to an excellent BBC Radio 4 programme, 'The Joy of 9 to 5', about managers. Presenter Lucy Kellaway investigated what managers actually do, and introduced us to some new approaches to management, emanating in particular...
I've just finished reading James Rhodes's book Instrumental. Nobody can put down the book without feeling intense sympathy for him and admiration for the way he's turned his traumatic experiences into positive motivation for life as a concert pianist. No-one can doubt...
I've been looking forward to performing Beethoven's song cycle 'An die ferne Geliebte' with tenor Jamie MacDougall next week at Glasgow University's lunchtime concert series. Admission to this popular series is free by the way! Unfortunately Jamie has had to pull out...
On Tuesday 13 October at 1pm I'm giving a lecture-recital about Beethoven's opus 109 piano sonata at the Brunton Theatre in Musselburgh, on the edge of Edinburgh. Preparing for this event has taken an embarrassingly long time. Practising the sonata itself is one...
I haven't written anything here for a while because I've been away at the International Musicians' Seminar 'Open Chamber Music' in Prussia Cove, Cornwall. We had a week of rehearsals in Prussia Cove (see photo), and then eight of us did a week of touring, giving five...
A reader has reproached me for not including the classic Richard Tauber recording in my previous blog post about different versions of Léhar's aria 'Dein ist mein ganzes Herz'. He points out that the composer actually wrote with Tauber's voice in mind, so mine was...
One of the highlights of Saturday's 'Last Night of the Proms' was Jonas Kaufmann singing 'Dein ist mein ganzes Herz' from Franz Léhar's operetta 'The Land of Smiles' (Das Land des Laechelns). Oh my goodness, what a song! So beautifully constructed, such clever and...