I think I've mentioned that I have an album coming out on the Hyperion label in October. It's a selection of piano music by some of the women featured in my book Women and the Piano, and adopts the same title. I hope it will work as a sort of companion to the book,...
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On the radio the other day they were talking about albums of recorded music, and whether the concept of 'an album' still makes any sense in an era of singly streamed tracks. Commentators thought that there were certain albums, for example Amy Winehouse's 'Back to...
This week I've been watching quite a lot of sport - World Cup football and Wimbledon tennis matches. I'm a latecomer to sports fandom and, to be honest, I only follow the big tournaments. The rest of the year, sport fades from my consciousness. But I still feel one...
This week I came across the video made by cellist Felix Wurman about Domus at the beginning of the group's career. We were trying to publicise our concerts in our portable concert hall, a large geodesic dome which the players assembled out of aluminium tubes, putting...
In the past year there have been almost no live concerts, and therefore no reviews of the traditional kind. But sometimes there are reviews of streamed concerts, and the piano quartets I performed earlier this month with the excellent Scottish Chamber Orchestra...
Yesterday I was in Perth, recording Mozart and Beethoven quintets for piano and wind instruments with principal players of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra - Adrian Wilson, Timothy Orpen, David Hubbard and Chris Gough. The performance will be relayed as a Radio 3...
Thank you to everyone who sent me a nice message after last night's streaming of the latest concert in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's digital series - on this occasion, a programme curated by their principal cellist Philip Higham and presenting two piano quartets by...
It's now a whole year since concerts started being cancelled in anticipation of the pandemic. I remember very well that I had been to a birthday coffee party where the extended family sat around a big circular glass-topped table while our reflections ate scones and...
After a long winter in the deep freeze (in more ways than one) - at last! - a concert to tell you about. It won't be performed in front of a live audience - that long-awaited moment is probably still months away- but it will be broadcast on YouTube and Facebook on...
This week we watched Amy Berg's 2015 documentary about Janis Joplin, 'Little Girl Blue', which tells Janis's story with the help of letters she wrote to her family while on tour. It's an absorbing watch, full of great footage, excellent interviews with her family,...
I keep coming across articles about the importance of revising our approach to international travel. For the sake of the environment as well as public health, we're told, we should be working towards the possibility of doing everything in the places where we live....
The other day I was listening to a ballet dancer reminiscing on radio about the time when, as a girl, she took part in a ballet masterclass given by Dame Margot Fonteyn. Dame Margot, it seems, was more terrifying in person than the students had expected. 'She hardly...
I was half-listening to the radio this morning when they were talking about fishing rights. The concept of 'zonal attachment' was being explained. I learned that this was a new and scientific way of approaching the issue of fishing rights. Fish move around; from year...
At last there is more commentary about the challenges facing freelance artists. Yesterday there was a strongly-worded cry for help in The Observer from several leading musicians, warning that if the UK's musicians are not supported, we could lose them for ever. I have...
In response to yesterday's outrage about an HM Government ad showing 'Fatima', a young ballet dancer as an example of someone who might switch to 'working in cyber', I'm posting an excerpt from 'J is for Job (not a proper)', from my book A Musician's Alphabet (Faber,...