Channel 4's series The Piano began its second series last night. It's always interesting to see the different playing styles of the pianists who put themselves forward to play a station piano in front of a crowd of listeners. Some of them play beautifully. However,...
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Today is 'World Piano Day' (as if every day wasn't piano day!) and Yale University Press has been tweeting a little clip of me talking about the French pianist-composer Hélène de Montgeroult. De Montgeroult is one of the pianist-composers featured in my new book Women...
On Monday there was a report in The Guardian about the benefits of being involved in music. This time it was, 'Playing a musical instrument or singing is linked to better memory in older age'. To my delight the next paragraph began, 'The piano was especially...
Noriko Ogawa has finished translating my book 'Out of Silence' into Japanese, after more than a year's work. As Noriko zooms about the world, she and her editor in Tokyo have been corresponding about the precise choice of words and the appropriate tone, and I have...
Our discussion at the Guildhall on Friday, about talking to the audience, turned out to be unexpectedly interesting. It would take too long to report on all the facets of the discussion, but here's one of them. All the performers agreed that talking to the audience is...
Back in the seventies, a friend told me he was reading a book by Marshall McLuhan on how technology was beginning to intrude into everyday life. 'Apparently there is no activity which human beings will not interrupt in order to answer a ringing phone', reported my...
I'm on my way to Perth in Scotland, for the third of my Mozart Series programmes with violinist Erich Hobarth. We'll rehearse today, and the concert is on Saturday evening at 7.30pm in Perth Concert Hall. Please come along, Perthshire music-lovers! Mozart popped up on...
It was lucky I didn't have to play the piano much while I was in Austria, because I have been nursing a small injury to my right hand. It happened back in December when I was playing a solo programme including Ligeti's 'Musica Ricercata'. In the second piece, as the...
Thanks, everyone, for your feedback about Billy Mayerl. Thank you also to those who opened my eyes to 'wave forms' and YouTube channels and iTunes issues, and to options for self-publishing one's recordings that I hadn't known about. Food for thought! I'll definitely...
This morning we listened to a delightful edition of 'Desert Island Discs' featuring Sir David Attenborough, irresistible as always. What a lovely voice he has! 'Desert Island Discs' is a long-running radio series in which each 'castaway' chooses the eight records...
Some years ago I recorded 'Loose Elbows', a CD of Billy Mayerl's piano music. It features some of the sparkling, good-humoured pieces Billy wrote when he was the celebrated pianist at the Savoy Hotel in London in the 1920s and 30s. My disc has been in and out of print...
An intriguing article in the Guardian this week about The Chemical Brothers. They’re thoughtful and interesting, but some of their comments about music and audiences were startling for me, because they showed such a different facet of the music world. "I don't really...
As an antidote to all the stress of last week, we went to see The Artist, the French film which is now starting to win all kinds of awards. I had read of its producer's difficulties in persuading people to back his eccentric idea of making a silent, black-and-white...
On the day after the first of the Florestan Trio's Beethoven Cycle concerts in the Wigmore Hall on Friday, a kind member of the audience invited me to lunch in Le Caprice, a lovely restaurant to which I had never been before. The bread basket on our table contained a...
Over New Year I have been corresponding quite a bit with pianist Noriko Ogawa, who has almost finished translating my book 'Out of Silence' into Japanese. Though I am really looking forward to the Japanese edition, due out in spring, I am rather sorry that the stream...