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...
It's now a week since the Florestan Festival ended, and lots of people have been kind enough to write and say what they thought of it. One thing is very interesting: there's enormous variety in what people enjoyed best. Some relished the things which were new for...
People sometimes ask where they can find my 1990 disc of piano music by Billy Mayerl, and I haven't been able to tell them. Since Virgin Classics was bought by EMI, and after parts of EMI were moved to Paris, it's become very hard to follow the fate of a record which...
We're just back from the Florestan Festival at Peasmarsh. What an extraordinary thing a festival is. A few hours before the first concert, the church is completely quiet, the country lanes are empty, and you can't imagine that anyone will really come. You finish the...
Despite this week's rehearsals for the Florestan Festival I've managed to watch several rounds of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition on television (the Final is on Sunday). I've been following this bi-annual competition for many years and always find it...
Just back from a successful trip to the Echternach Festival in Luxembourg. We played in a very pretty but wildly over-resonant church whose acoustics were only somewhat subdued by the presence of the audience. During the rehearsal, when the church was empty, we...
One of the pieces we're playing in Luxembourg tonight is a piano trio arrangement of Janacek's first string quartet, known as ‘The Kreutzer Sonata' after a short story by Tolstoy. The story recounts how the narrator becomes jealous of his wife after she forms a...
I've written an article for The Guardian, due to be published tomorrow (Friday 5 June) in the Film and Music supplement. It's about the trio's festival plans to perform Beethoven's Second Symphony in the composer's arrangement for piano trio. This year there are...
The new little convolvulus plant in our garden has just flowered for the first time. Its six delicate purple flowers will be gone by the end of the day. Bob says there should be new flowers tomorrow. We bought the convolvulus plant in homage to a wonderful sight in...
Today I've been rehearsing a quintet for piano and strings with some very fine players using some very fine old Italian string instruments. I'm never sure if it's good to say who owns what, so I'll just say that these top-league instruments sounded incredible. One of...
I've been putting together a special performing score of my Haydn piano concerto for the Florestan Festival. I'm going to be directing the performance ‘from the keyboard', and I don't want to have too many pages to turn. There's so much else going on in the festival -...
Last night we attended the dress rehearsal of Handel's opera ‘Giulio Cesare' at Glyndebourne, thanks to a friend in the orchestra who kindly gave us tickets. Dress rehearsals at Glyndebourne, which are free but reserved for friends, family and supporters' groups of...
The index finger of my left hand has been painful for some days. I think I whacked the piano keyboard too hard during a phrase marked ‘brutal' in a performance of Messiaen last week. Next morning, I picked up a mug of tea and it really hurt to curl my finger around...