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...
I’m off to Vienna to rehearse four programmes of Mozart’s music which violinist Erich Höbarth and I are playing this season in Perth Concert Hall, Scotland's newest concert hall (our first concert is on November 11). We’re tackling twelve of Mozart’s sonatas for piano...
In the wake of the Trondheim competition, I’ve been thinking about the gap between the jury’s taste and the public’s taste in performers. Several times during the competition I happened to bump into members of the public in the coffee shop, or in the foyers of the...
Yesterday on the flight home from Norway, our flight crew announced that the airline had just installed free WiFi on certain planes, including ours. As I had a laptop with me I was able to send my first e-mail from the sky. Even more amazingly, a reply pinged straight...
This week I'm on the jury of the Trondheim International Chamber Competition, which this year is for piano trios. During the day we've been listening to nine piano trios playing very demanding programmes, and in the evenings we've been rehearsing for and playing in...
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...