Talk of how people are going to watch the King's Coronation next week has reminded me of my father's tale about Queen Elizabeth's Coronation in 1953. My father had recently moved to Scotland to marry my Scottish mother. Before coming to Edinburgh, my dad had been...
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This weekend I heard that my old friend Gerald Pointon had died. I felt like writing this little reminiscence. Gerald was a high-powered lawyer in Paris, specialising in arbitration. As a graduate student at Cambridge University he had sung in the famous choir of...
Last week I was in Vienna for a few days of Easter holiday. We managed to pack in lots of music-related things: a concert at the Musikverein, an evening at the State Opera, a visit to one of Mozart's apartments, a visit to Haydn's house in what was the village of...
We have a pair of resident blackbirds in our garden, and every day the male blackbird perches on the chimney and sings loudly, especially at dusk. He seems to have several ‘songs’ or sequences of phrases which he sings over and over. I’ve heard them hundreds of times,...
An interesting discussion with students about whether it’s right to ‘scale things up’ to 21st century tastes when playing 18th/19th century music. They had played Beethoven so powerfully and with such speed and ringing ‘attack’ that I found myself wondering whether...
To Cambridge, where I heard a fine May Week concert at King’s College. (As Clive James pointed out in the title of a book of memoirs, May Week is in June.) It was great to hear that the tradition of excellent music-making continues, even though ‘performance’ is only a...
After I had finished my rehearsal in Rye Church in East Sussex the other day, I was standing outside the church waiting for the rain to stop, and my eye fell on the War Memorial commemorating local men who had given their lives in the World Wars of 1914-19 and...
I yield to no-one in my devotion to The Guardian, which I read every day, but I’ve been struck recently by what seems to be a disturbing policy of excluding classical music from discussions of ‘music’. A few weeks ago the paper published a 50-page guide to summer...
I'm off to the Florestan Festival in East Sussex today. I always enjoy imagining people setting off towards Peasmarsh from many different compass points. Most of our rehearsals have happened to the accompaniment of pouring rain, so we can only hope the spell of wet...
Saw a quietly beautiful Italian film, Le Quattro Volte, directed by Michelangelo Frammartino. It was inspired by Pythagoras's belief that each of us contains four interlinked lives: human, animal, vegetable and mineral. 'Man is made of mineral, because he has a...
On Monday, Mark Lawson wrote in the Guardian about how politicians are averse to being associated with 'high art' because they don't wish to be seen as 'élitist'. In today's paper there are several letters in reply, one of them from me.
My days of being able to be knocked down by a feather are past, but you could have knocked me down with a full-grown marrow, or possibly a crusty baguette, when I discovered that my birthday was the featured one in The Times’ birthday column on Thursday, at the bottom...
Isn't it funny how our tastes can change over time? I used not to like the 'old English roses' as much as the simpler kind. I found the structure of 'old roses', with their mass of tiny petals, too fussy and complicated. I preferred the classic rose of the kind that...
... Couldn't resist the pun! After watching the swan on her nest on a little island in the middle of the lake in the local park for weeks, we were delighted to see her on the water with these handsome cygnets at the weekend.
A while ago, Bob was given a special bottle of wine by way of thanks for something. We kept waiting for the perfect opportunity to drink it, but as nothing perfect ever presented itself, he finally decided that we should stop being so fussy and just drink it to...