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...
After lamenting the lack of music in Venice churches, I had the opposite experience yesterday when attending Evensong in the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. It’s always uplifting to hear the Chapel resounding to the pure intonation and chiselled phrases of the...
I’ve just been in Venice for a few days. The city was on the cusp of autumn – warm and sunny but with thunderstorms looming, and mist in the morning on the day we left. We visited about 547 churches. As ever in Italy, I’m disappointed by how rarely one hears any music...
In November, my trio is giving the premiere of a new work which has been written for us – is being written for us, I should say – by Huw Watkins. Earlier in the summer I pestered Huw to let me have what he’d written so far, and though the parts aren't fully finished...
There's been a lot in the press this summer about middle-aged women and the way they're unceremoniously dropped from positions such as BBC newsreader or presenter. Newsreader Selina Scott brought the topic to everyone's attention with her age discrimination claim...
I was in the audience this week at a concert of ‘early music'. At one point, a harpsichordist played a piece. Between two of its variations he pulled out a harpsichord stop which produced a different tone colour, and then he played a fast variation. When it was over,...
I recently made up a couple of cadenzas for a Haydn piano concerto. I kind of improvised them at the piano, and played them in the concert without ever writing them out. Afterwards, I thought I'd try and note them down before I forgot them entirely. Cadenzas are...
Last night's Prom offered the invigorating spectacle of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra playing beautifully under their fine young conductor Ilan Volkov. One of the good effects of globalisation has been on the standards of orchestral playing. Because of the...
I've been thinking about Charles Hazlewood's article in Monday's Guardian. He wrote about some open-air orchestral concerts he's going to conduct in a field in Somerset, explaining that he wants to bring great music out of the intimidating concert hall and into a fun...
Last night, I stupidly didn't watch the first part of the MGM Film Musicals Prom on television, and only turned on for the second half. I'm so used to concerts of this kind being slightly embarrassing; orchestras often sound uncomfortable with the idiom, and there's...
Last night we went to hear Mendelssohn's 2nd Symphony at the Proms, played by the excellent Hallé Orchestra under their conductor Sir Mark Elder. A few weeks ago, Bob reviewed all the available recordings of Mendelssohn's 2nd Symphony for Radio 3's CD Review 'Building...
The final concerts of my season took place last week at the Cerne Abbas Music Festival in Dorset with the Gaudier Ensemble. During the festival we gave a late-night performance of Messiaen's ‘Quartet for the End of Time' in a candlelit church, with no other lights...
Controversy in the press about whether Proms audiences should be discouraged from clapping so much. What's under the spotlight is the Prommers' habit of clapping in between movements, and the growing sport of racing each other to be the first to applaud vociferously...