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...
Interested in what Susan has to say about all things classical music? Subscribe below and whenever Susan writes a new blog post you will be notified by email. Simple!
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...
It's now a week since the Florestan Festival ended, and lots of people have been kind enough to write and say what they thought of it. One thing is very interesting: there's enormous variety in what people enjoyed best. Some relished the things which were new for...
We're just back from the Florestan Festival at Peasmarsh. What an extraordinary thing a festival is. A few hours before the first concert, the church is completely quiet, the country lanes are empty, and you can't imagine that anyone will really come. You finish the...
Just back from a successful trip to the Echternach Festival in Luxembourg. We played in a very pretty but wildly over-resonant church whose acoustics were only somewhat subdued by the presence of the audience. During the rehearsal, when the church was empty, we...
One of the pieces we're playing in Luxembourg tonight is a piano trio arrangement of Janacek's first string quartet, known as ‘The Kreutzer Sonata' after a short story by Tolstoy. The story recounts how the narrator becomes jealous of his wife after she forms a...
I've written an article for The Guardian, due to be published tomorrow (Friday 5 June) in the Film and Music supplement. It's about the trio's festival plans to perform Beethoven's Second Symphony in the composer's arrangement for piano trio. This year there are...
I've been putting together a special performing score of my Haydn piano concerto for the Florestan Festival. I'm going to be directing the performance ‘from the keyboard', and I don't want to have too many pages to turn. There's so much else going on in the festival -...
I spent a long tube journey today reading the newspaper articles and special supplements about tonight's Champions' League Final football match between Manchester United and Barcelona. I'm not much of a sports fan, but anything can become interesting once you take the...
Today was a Bank Holiday, but I hardly noticed. To me it was just a valuable practice day in the week leading up to the rehearsal period for the trio's festival. Next Monday marks the beginning of a ten-day period in which we have to prepare all the pieces we're...
This morning we flew back from Berlin. Yesterday's thunderstorm had been swept away and the sky was a brilliant blue, with hundreds of fluffy white clouds bobbing about beneath us. Sometimes when travelling by plane, especially on a dull day, the glorious sunshine...
Off early this morning to Heathrow for a concert this evening with the trio in Berlin's Konzerthaus. We used never to travel somewhere far away on the day of a concert, in case of delays. We'd had one or two nasty experiences which made us conclude that we must always...
Practising Schubert's E flat trio for a concert tonight, I remembered a delightful moment in a talk Bob gave about Schubert's chamber music at the Florestan Festival a couple of years ago. He told the audience about the earliest known biography of Schubert, written by...
Last week my trio played two concerts in Wigmore Hall, one of the world's premier venues for chamber music. Both concerts were sold out, with people standing at the back and people being turned away at the box office. Yet there was not a single review in any...