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...
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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...
I've been watching Channel 4's new series, 'The Piano', in which amateur piano-playing members of the public put themselves forward to come and play an upright piano in the foyer of one of Britain's main railway stations. Unknown to them, watching behind the scenes...
My publisher, Boydell Press, has put a short extract from my new book Out of Silence on their blog. You can read it by clicking here. The blog also shows the book's cover image for the first time. I'm irrationally proud of this cover because I took the photograph! It...
More in the press today about how older women TV presenters are sidelined. It seems that not only women over sixty, but even women over forty start to become ‘invisible’, or at any rate unviewable. By this yardstick I must be well on my way to disappearing like the...
I’m starting to look forward to my piano masterclasses this weekend. Six young professional pianists are going to be my students. I’ve always hesitated to say ‘students’ ever since a friend came to listen to the masterclasses at Prussia Cove and commented afterwards...
Bob has just made his fourth batch of marmalade this month, using Seville oranges which are only available in January. Batch 1 had to be thrown away when he got engrossed in some editing work and left the boiling marmalade to caramelise. Batch 2 was an unusual recipe...
The parade of unusual bird visitors continues. The other day, in our local park, we saw half a dozen large cormorants, or perhaps shags, sitting on a wooden platform in the middle of the lake. Surely cormorants are seabirds, found on rocky cliffs? But there they were...
In the bread section of the supermarket I was startled to see a tall baguette labelled ‘Pain Flute’. I was reading in English and thought the store’s labelling team had gone all poetical on a dark winter’s afternoon. Isn’t there a poem by Tagore which talks about the...
There's a little interview with me in the 'Meet the Artist' series on BBC Music Magazine's website. It focuses on the masterclass weekend I'm teaching in February. As is usually the way, the interviewer hasn't chosen the bits of the interview I would have chosen...
Out of the Saturday Guardian fell a slim booklet about Keats, the first in a series about Romantic Poets. It fell open at Keats' ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. My eye fell on the lines, ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard//Are sweeter’ I read this line aloud to Bob....
The winter weather has brought some unusual birds to our garden. A week or so ago we had a little flock of birds about the size of thrushes, but more colourful, with orangey plumage on their necks and chests. At around the same time the Guardian mentioned that its...
I’m supposed to be on a train to the north of England at the moment to perform with the trio at Cockermouth Music Society this evening. But last night our cellist, Richard, phoned to say that he had come down with the winter vomiting bug. There was no way he could...
The cygnets on the lake in our local park have almost grown up. We’ve been watching them for a whole year now, and have realised that the ‘Ugly Duckling’ legend is deeply inappropriate. These young swans never looked anything other than handsome and confident, even...
Just finished three days of recording in Henry Wood Hall, a converted church in south London. I feel stiff and aching all over, as if a horse has been jumping up and down on me. Recording is such an arduous process! Every time I do it, I wonder why on earth it is...