Hyperion Records, which was recently bought by Universal, has decided to make its catalogue of recordings available on streaming platforms for the first time. The first batch of 200 Hyperion recordings has just gone up on Apple Music, Spotify, iTunes and so on. As the...
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The Coronation of King Charles III came in the same week that we heard the organisation Psappha, which promotes new music, had been forced to close because of funding problems. This in itself followed hard on the heels of threats to close the BBC Singers and reduce...
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...
A lovely surprise awaited me when I played at the Brunton Theatre on Tuesday. Sitting in the front row was my first piano teacher, Gordon Lindsay ('Mr Lindsay', as I knew him). He taught me from when I began piano lessons at the age of seven until I was nine or ten....
Finally I have managed to track down a copy of this month's 'Classical Music' magazine, which for some reason has become harder and harder to find in the shops. Knowing there was to be an article about me in the February issue, I tried to find the magazine in a number...
I haven't yet seen the movie 'LaLa Land' (it doesn't open in the UK until tomorrow). But I enjoyed hearing BBC Radio 4's 'Today' item this morning on how Ryan Gosling, who plays a struggling jazz musician in the film, learned to play the piano for it. He does all the...
Today I'm making my Christmas cake, a few days ahead of 'Stir-up Sunday' which is, I believe, this coming Sunday. It's a traditional day for families to get together to make steamed Christmas puddings, and in these days when most households have their own ovens, baked...
The weather has been extremely humid lately and my piano doesn't like it. I have a little device which registers the temperature and humidity; for weeks it has been announcing the humidity as 75%. I have an older piano with ivory key coverings (newer pianos have...
This morning there was a discussion on Radio 4 about the response of the arts in the UK to the Brexit vote. Contributors rightly said that there is much we can and must do to understand who we are, what are the social issues facing us, how can we forge a constructive...
The UK vote to leave the European Union has shocked the classical music world, particularly the young European musicians who have opted to study, live or work in the UK courtesy of EU rules and funding. I've taught them and played with them on various courses and have...
Two recent topics of conversation have come together in my mind to prompt a question. Topic 1: the number of classical concert reviews is shrinking rapidly. Everyone in the profession has noticed it. Many newspapers are reducing the number of classical reviews they...
We have a lovely cat, Daisy, whom we 'rescued' from a cat shelter. Shortly after she moved in, another cat got in through the catflap one evening. We were out and didn't see what happened, but the two cats had clearly had an epic struggle. Clumps of cat fur were on...
At the weekend I had an unusual experience. Following the conclusion of BBC Young Musician and viewers' anger that the result was so under-reported, I wrote a letter to The Guardian about the wider issue. We've heard a lot recently about orchestras folding, opera...
In today's Guardian I have a letter which aroused quite a lot of interest when it appeared online yesterday. Please share it if you agree. Here's what I said: 'Much of the recent discourse around classical music and its troubles has contained a subtext of glee at the...
Today I went to the BP Portrait Exhibition, a favourite annual exhibition. As for some years now, the emphasis was on near-photographic realism, achieved with admirable technical skill but occasionally at the expense of 'suggestiveness' if I could put it like that. By...