This week I've been trying to find out what happened to the album of Mozart piano and violin sonatas that the wonderful Viennese violinist Erich Höbarth and I made in 2012. (That's us in the photo.) It was compiled from live recordings of a concert series we performed...
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It was great to be part of the RSNO chamber series in Glasgow yesterday afternoon in its first 'live' concert for an in-person audience since the pandemic. That's a gap of almost three years! Photo shows (L to R) cellist Pei Jee Ng, me, violist Tom Dunn, violinist...
I'm preparing for a solo recital at Kettle's Yard museum in Cambridge on November 24th. Kettle's Yard is a beautiful little museum which began in the 1950s as a personal art collection by Jim Ede, who used his own house as the display venue. It was the first gallery I...
I’m supposed to be on a train to the north of England at the moment to perform with the trio at Cockermouth Music Society this evening. But last night our cellist, Richard, phoned to say that he had come down with the winter vomiting bug. There was no way he could...
A very busy week ended with a concert and party for the Friends of the Florestan Trio. What a nice thing a Friends’ Organisation is! So much of a musician’s time, especially a pianist’s time, is spent working alone or with just a few other people. It’s easy to lose...
London is blanketed in snow at the moment. Dragging my little suitcase gingerly over the icy pavements, I managed to get in to the LSO St Luke’s Centre this morning to rehearse for my first concert of the year, the first of four concerts by the Florestan Trio in the...
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...