In our student days, those of us studying music (and in fact anyone who wanted to continue their piano studies) were allowed to hire upright pianos and put them in our rooms. Not infrequently there were two or more people on the staircase with pianos in their rooms -...
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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...
There's news today of an important new women's health strategy in England. 'Ministers have vowed to tackle decades of “systemic” and “entrenched” gender health inequality in England with plans to introduce compulsory women’s health training for doctors, more cancer...
When I was in the Highlands recently I had the pleasure of meeting the eminent Scots musicologist Dr John Purser, who has been presenting a long-running series of radio programmes on the history of Scots music - much of which has come as a surprise to today's radio...
Just returned from a ‘summer' holiday on the Isle of Skye, in the Highlands of Scotland. It rained almost continuously, so we were hardly surprised when we learned that our visit was part of the most prolonged spell of wet weather recorded on the island since 1861....
A friend has been telling me about a DVD of cellist Bernard Greenhouse giving masterclasses. Greenhouse spoke about the great Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, with whom he had studied. Casals was well-known for his love of smoking a pipe. Asked how much he smoked, he...
This is our cat at her 14th birthday party. She has been having chemotherapy for 15 months now. She's responded to it extremely well, but all the same we felt that her 14th birthday was something to celebrate. Now that the cat is on steroids, she has changed the...
I recently made up a couple of cadenzas for a Haydn piano concerto. I kind of improvised them at the piano, and played them in the concert without ever writing them out. Afterwards, I thought I'd try and note them down before I forgot them entirely. Cadenzas are...
Whenever I delete spam mails from this blog I'm intrigued by their prose style. Sent by shadowy advertisers, this special type of spam is targeted at blogs. I'm still fooled sometimes because they quote the title of one of my own blog posts, and appear to be a...
Last night we went to hear Mendelssohn's 2nd Symphony at the Proms, played by the excellent Hallé Orchestra under their conductor Sir Mark Elder. A few weeks ago, Bob reviewed all the available recordings of Mendelssohn's 2nd Symphony for Radio 3's CD Review 'Building...
Controversy in the press about whether Proms audiences should be discouraged from clapping so much. What's under the spotlight is the Prommers' habit of clapping in between movements, and the growing sport of racing each other to be the first to applaud vociferously...
I watched a fascinating TV drama-documentary about conductor Arturo Toscanini. During his lifetime he was famous for his expressive gestures when conducting. Orchestral musicians who played for him said that it was always perfectly clear what he wanted them to do. It...
Listening to Desert Island Discs on radio this morning, I was startled to hear impresario Harvey Goldsmith discussing the ‘riders' - or additional contractual requests - demanded by some of his pop artists and their entourages to make their lives more pleasant on...
The Author, the newsletter of the Society of Authors, has just dropped on to the doormat. It's full of doom and gloom about the effects of the recession on writers, particularly freelance writers. Fewer reviews are being commissioned by newspapers. Rates of pay have...
Our cat is having treatment, and needs a pill every day or two. She's always hated us giving her pills, so we usually ask the vet to do it. But now that pill-giving has become so frequent, we have to do it ourselves - preferably without chasing the cat round the house...