I have been going to events at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival. There seems to be a lot of overlap between the audiences, because I keep seeing the same faces. It's interesting to observe the effects that different performers have on the audiences. Some performers banter...
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A friend and I have been discussing the career of a mutual friend who died recently. He was a fabulous musician who wasn't as well known as he should have been. Writers and visual artists can stay put in the place where they choose to live, and create their work...
I have been keeping half an eye on the 2025 Van Cliburn piano competition in Texas, partly because when I was writing Women and the Piano I did a fair amount of research into the gender disparity one can see in the lists of piano competition prizewinners around 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...
Each weekday evening at 10.45pm this week, Radio 3's 'The Essay' slot is presenting a series of talks about the piano. Alastair Sooke, Stuart Isacoff, Wendy Cope and Luke Jerram are all talking about different aspects of the piano, its history, its personality and the...
I’m down by the sea in Prussia Cove in Cornwall, at the autumn chamber music seminar of the International Musicians’ Seminar, from which I have had an unaccountably long break. I remember thinking I’d have a little rest from it for a year or two. All of a sudden it...
Last night we watched the Olympics closing ceremony, basically a long pop concert with eccentric dance interludes. I assume that the singers couldn't really hear their support groups or backing tracks in the enormous stadium - at least, I'm giving them the benefit of...
I have joined the roster of speakers represented by the Ed Victor Agency. If you are interested in booking me as a speaker, Visit their Speakers' Bureau and scroll down the alphabetical list until you come to T. I've always enjoyed speaking to concert audiences, and...
The other day I went to an orchestral concert, at the end of which the conductor held up a hand for silence and made an emotional speech about how this kind of music needs our support more than ever, because classical musicians feel 'marginalised'. He said that young...
Went to hear a consort of viols playing their own arrangement of Bach's Goldberg Variations, which were written for a keyboard instrument. It's such wonderful music that it has inspired various people to arrange it for different instruments - I have heard it done...
Yesterday I adjudicated a scholarship whose auditions were held at the Royal Academy of Music. Their Josefowitz Recital Hall is set into the ground at basement level. Half way up the wall behind the stage is a large half-moon-shaped window as wide as the room. This...