BBC Young Musician 2022 reaches its climax tonight when the winners of five categories - strings, wind, brass, percussion and piano - compete to be crowned 'BBC Young Musician of the Year'. The competition is on BBC4 at 7pm. I think if it were up to me, I'd stop at...
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On Saturday, I appeared at the Wigtown Book Festival in Dumfries and Galloway in the west of Scotland (see photo of me being interviewed by Stuart Kelly). Wigtown is Scotland's 'national book town', boasting an astonishing number of bookshops for a small town which is...
I often tweet about music and related matters. Usually the response is small - I'm thrilled if my tweets reach a couple of hundred people. So my experience yesterday was exceptional. I was watching The Queen's funeral which, as you'll know, had a variety of music in...
Yesterday I was in King’s College, Cambridge to hear the ‘Carols from King’s’ service, which will be broadcast on Christmas Eve on BBC2. When I was a student at the college, the choir sang Evensong every day and I missed most of the services, telling myself that I...
Still feeling cross that the Guardian, in its review of classical music in the past decade, did not say a single word about chamber music. Guardian writer Tom Service devoted almost his whole summary to opera and orchestral music. This happens year after year, no...
On Saturday night I gave a solo recital in Cambridge. It was unexpectedly enjoyable because of the audience’s warm response. Even in this season of coughs and colds, they kept utterly silent while I was playing (which has not always been the case elsewhere this...
I’m looking forward to taking part in a literature event at the South Bank on Monday evening at 7.45pm. The novelist Eva Hoffman has invited fellow novelist Janice Galloway and me to join her in a discussion of what it’s like to write about music. I don’t really know...
This photo shows me outside the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, standing beside the poster for the Florestan Trio’s three concerts. On the day after the concerts, Bob and I caught the old tram up the hill of the Alfama district to visit the castle. While we were...
When I got back from Lisbon this afternoon, I looked at my website statistics and saw that an awful lot of people had looked at the website on Saturday while I was away. I realised later that it must have been because of the Guardian’s heart-warming review that day of...
A memorable evening last night at Wigmore Hall. We’ve played in a few less-than-ideal acoustics recently (some too resonant, some too dry) so it was a real pleasure to hear the sound ringing through the air of the Wigmore Hall. Such an acoustic actually makes the...
We went to Cambridge to play a concert in Peterhouse, the oldest and smallest of Cambridge University’s colleges. Our travel plans had gone awry, and we arrived an hour late and a bit agitated. Dusk was falling, and by the time we finished our rehearsal it was dark....
For the past few days the trio has been rehearsing intensively. Over the next ten days we have two concerts at the Bath Mozartfest, a fundraising concert and dinner for the Florestan Trust, a concert at the University of Cambridge, a concert in the Wigmore Hall (with...
The other night, at the theatre, I was amazed by how freely people in the audience were coughing. At one point, the coughs became so frequent that it was like hearing bull-frogs calling to one another at night from different parts of the swamp. I actually started to...
At last the printed score has arrived for the trio by Huw Watkins. We’re giving the world premiere in the Wigmore Hall on November 25. When the newly published score arrived, I already knew the notes of the piano part, because I’ve been working from an electronic PDF...
I’ve just realised that this is my hundredth blog post on this website. I am a centenarian! To celebrate, here’s a sweet story I heard from Mark Morris when I attended his question-and-answer session the other night at Sadler’s Wells. He was complaining about someone...