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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BBC Radio 3's 'Record Review' programme this morning contained a 'Building a Library' feature on the Ravel Trio. Reviewer Jeremy Sams, a well-known Francophile, compared the available recordings. Mentioning the enormous technical difficulty of all three instrumental...
Over the years, my recordings have often featured on BBC Radio 3's Saturday morning programme, Record Review. They have a long-running feature called 'Building a Library', where each week a reviewer sifts through the available recordings of a classic piece and...
Here are a couple of reviews of the Florestan Trio's Beethoven trio concerts in the Wigmore Hall this week. The series came to a memorable close on 13 January with a standing ovation from the Wigmore audience. The Independent five-star review of the first concert The...
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...
Yesterday Radio 3's 'Building a Library' feature on CD Review focused on Schumann's first piano trio, in D minor opus 63. Erica Jeal's overall recommendation was for a 1958 recording of Emil Gilels, Msistlav Rostropovich and Leonid Kogan, and her choice for the best...
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...
I read last week of the death of ex-Sony chief Norio Ohga, the ‘father of the CD’. When Sony launched the CD format in 1982, Mr Ohga insisted that a disc must be long enough to contain his favourite piece, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. This determined the 75-minute...
Here's the Florestan Trio on stage at Wigmore Hall at the end of our Monday lunchtime concert. It was broadcast live on Radio 3 and will be repeated this Saturday 19 March at 2pm. It's also available this week on iPlayer. It's always a delight to play at Wigmore...
I have been in Germany, where one of the Florestan Trio's performances was in the beautiful 18th century Schloss Bruchsal, a place I admit I hadn't heard of. It turned out that Mozart had visited there, not to play, but to have a meeting with the powerful...
To everything there is a season .... and the Florestan Trio has announced its final season of concerts. We'll be concluding a year from now with a celebratory Beethoven Cycle in the Wigmore Hall, London. For the full text of the announcement, please click on the...
The clocks went back last night, and we all had an extra hour in bed. This should have been ideal at the end of a day of recording Shostakovich. Recording is an arduous process and I was looking forward to relaxing when it was all over. But could I take advantage of...
This weekend, the Florestan Trio is recording the first piano trio by Shostakovich, a student work of the composer's. We're adding it to a Shostakovich disc which we recorded a little while ago, and the whole CD will come out in the New Year on the Hyperion label. On...
To East Bergholt in Suffolk for a concert with the Florestan Trio. The artist John Constable was born in East Bergholt, and used to walk through the fields to school in Dedham. He later said it was that landscape which inspired him to become a painter. Before the...
The first concert of the new season for the Florestan Trio is on Tuesday 5 October at 7.30pm at Wigmore Hall, part of the Schumann bicentenary celebrations. What is it about Schumann which makes him such a favourite of musicians? He isn’t always a favourite at the box...