I've been watching the BBC Young Musician competition on television for many years now. Slowly, the competition has slipped from the major channels and is now shown on BBC4, whose output currently seems to consist of repeats, archive material and cultural things that...
Interested in what Susan has to say about all things classical music? Subscribe below and whenever Susan writes a new blog post you will be notified by email. Simple!
Tomorrow I'm playing a solo recital at the Lammermuir Festival, a lovely festival which takes place in various locations, sacred and secular, across the beautiful county of East Lothian in Scotland. I have practised my programme to the point of feeling a keen desire...
The other day I came across an article called 'The Pianoforte Recital'. It was published in The Musical Times in 1911 - over a century ago. The author, Frederick Kitchener (himself a pianist), complained that piano recitals had become far too numerous, and that...
In Trondheim in Norway, where the chamber music festival this week is featuring the music of Australian composer Brett Dean. Stylish posters advertise the concerts around town, playing on the titles of works being performed in the festival, or on events associated...
Went to the Wigmore Hall to hear American jazz pianist Brad Mehdau in duo with mandolinist Chris Thile. It was a tremendous evening, and also an opportunity to witness quite a different sort of crowd in the Wigmore. They were, I have to admit, younger and cooler than...
For the last month or so I’ve had a wart on the tip of my left index finger. A wart! I’ve never had one before. I think I had associated them with ghastly mediaeval illustrations, or fairytales in which unpleasant things get inflicted by magic on evil-doers. Anyway,...
I’ve been in Italy for a few days. One evening I went to a concert in the courtyard of a lovely historic building in Bologna. The Italians are so lucky to have so many of these theatrical spaces and the climate which makes it possible to sit there, in the balmy air,...
A friend was telling me about a piano recital he attended last year in the Wigmore Hall. During a Beethoven sonata, members of the audience were distracted by a low buzzing noise emanating from somewhere in the room, and judging by the pianist's increasingly cross...
A thoughtful letter today from a reader about recordings. He’s noticed that musicians often say they dislike the manicured, edited-to-within-an-inch-of-their-lives recordings of today, and prefer the more ‘natural’, warts-and-all approach of the earlier twentieth...
The Ambialet piano course ended last night with concerts by the participants (see some of them in the photo). It never ceases to amaze me how people manage to raise their game in these circumstances, even though most of them find it a nerve-racking experience and...
Violinist Gidon Kremer has, I hope, set the cat among the pigeons with his decision to pull out of the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. His letter of explanation is long and somewhat rambling, but perhaps he did not have the time to make it shorter. In any case, his...
An interesting discussion with the NZ Trio who are visiting London this week from their native New Zealand. We were talking about the challenge of performing some of the very long works in the trio repertoire, such as the Schubert trios (40-50 minutes). Many of our...
To the First Night of the Proms last night, courtesy of some kind friends who had rented a box in the Royal Albert Hall. Benjamin Grosvenor, an excellent young British pianist who has only just turned 19, played Liszt’s second piano concerto with great finesse and...
At a Gaudier Ensemble rehearsal last week my colleagues, who come from various European countries, were discussing the unstoppable rise in pitch. Here in England we still tune to A=440 Hz, which has been ‘standard pitch’ since the mid-twentieth-century, though in the...
This morning in the village church of Cerne Abbas, we invited the children of the local primary school to come and listen to a rehearsal of Aaron Copland's attractive piece, Appalachian Spring (part of tonight's concert programme). It lasts around 25 minutes, quite a...