Recently I visited my old college in Cambridge to give a recital. While I was there, I took the opportunity to attend two services of Evensong in the college chapel. As always, hearing sacred music sung in those glorious surroundings (see photo) was a striking...
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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...
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...
Tune in to Radio 4's 'Today' programme at 8.35am this morning, Tuesday 29 January, when I'll be taking part in a short discussion about coughing in concerts. We'll be discussing the research of Professor Andreas Wagener, who believes that coughing in concerts is both...
The snow is causing all sorts of disruption. On Friday I went into town to meet someone who didn't arrive because his flight from Austria was cancelled. On Saturday morning, I was supposed to be coaching a young German group, but their violinist was stuck in Germany...
Yesterday I heard on the news that a Liverpool University study had shown the power of literature to boost brain activity. 'Classic texts' such as Shakespeare and Wordsworth appear to catch the reader's attention more than ordinary texts, triggering heightened...
A nice thing to happen at the end of the year: music critic Kate Molleson, who writes for the Guardian as well as the Herald, has mentioned me at the start of her round-up of the year's musical highlights in Scotland. It brought back good memories of my series with...
On Christmas Day I was sorry to hear that the composer Richard Rodney Bennett had died in his adopted home, New York. RRB and I had been in touch since I made my Billy Mayerl disc. He wrote to me out of the blue to say how much he liked it. I was thrilled to get a...
Winter weather has suddenly arrived in London. There is ice on the smaller ponds frost on the bushes, and low winter sunshine striking dramatically through the trees. This week Erich Hoebarth and I - me in London and him in Vienna - are trying to go through all the...
'At the Guildhall [during the Bath Mozartfest], pianist Susan Tomes joined forces with the Viennese fiddler Erich Hoebarth for an all-Mozart programme of four sonatas for 'fortepiano with violin accompaniment' and one of his most significant fragments, Fantasia in C...
Erich Höbarth and I are travelling down to Bath today to prepare for our concert in the Mozartfest on Saturday morning. Our programme is all of Mozart, interspersing duo sonatas with piano solos, but it's a different programme to the all-Mozart one we played in the...
I have been coaching on the Marryat Chamber Music autumn course, which ended last night with a wonderful concert (see photo). I find it immensely cheering that such talented, accomplished young musicians obviously love chamber music so much and are determined to make...
Today is the launch of 'Astar', a lovely Royal Scottish National Orchestra CD (see photo) on which I play the piano. 'Astar' is the Gaelic word for 'journey'. The RSNO's brilliant idea, funded by Creative Scotland, is to give every child born in Scotland, from October...
Here are Erich Höbarth and me rehearsing Mozart at the Wigmore Hall yesterday for our concert last night. Having done all our rehearsals in my small piano room at home, it was thrilling to transfer to the Wigmore stage and to hear the music sail out into the gorgeous...