When I was in Cambridge recently I went to see the photos taken last year by photographer Jooney Woodward to mark fifty years of women undergraduates at King's College Cambridge. Last time I saw these photos, in June 2023, they were in the Chapel (I wrote about the...
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I'm enjoying the lull between major sports events - the Euros Football Tournament and the Wimbledon Tennis Championships just passed, and the Olympics which start in Paris at the end of the coming week. I got quite engrossed in both the tennis and the football,...
I have done an interview for the 'Brainland' podcast, a series 'where neuroscience, the arts and humanities mingle'. An old college friend, doctor and cellist Steve Brown, interviewed me about how I got started in music, how I got into chamber music, what motivates...
I'm teaching on a lovely summer course for pianists in the south of France. As I write, people are practising in the rooms all around me - everything from Schumann's Fantasy to Beethoven's opus 110, Debussy Preludes and Liszt's Vallée d'Obermann. Put together, we...
Violinist Gidon Kremer has, I hope, set the cat among the pigeons with his decision to pull out of the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. His letter of explanation is long and somewhat rambling, but perhaps he did not have the time to make it shorter. In any case, his...
This morning in the village church of Cerne Abbas, we invited the children of the local primary school to come and listen to a rehearsal of Aaron Copland's attractive piece, Appalachian Spring (part of tonight's concert programme). It lasts around 25 minutes, quite a...
I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the jury’s deliberations on the Cardiff Singer of the World final on Sunday night. I’d watched most of the other rounds and had realised it was going to be a difficult choice. It was an exceptionally good line-up, and...
Saw a quietly beautiful Italian film, Le Quattro Volte, directed by Michelangelo Frammartino. It was inspired by Pythagoras's belief that each of us contains four interlinked lives: human, animal, vegetable and mineral. 'Man is made of mineral, because he has a...
A lovely evening at Wigmore Hall last night listening to jazz from pianist Gwilym Simcock and 'reeds' player Klaus Gesing. What a well-matched duo they are, both superb musicians and excellent instrumentalists as well. Their ensemble playing was a lesson in how to be...
The July issue of Classic FM magazine, just out, is devoted to 'discovering the genius of Mendelssohn'. They asked me to write a little 'artist's view' of playing Mendelssohn's piano music, and my article is on p48. For those who don't have the chance to buy the...
My days of being able to be knocked down by a feather are past, but you could have knocked me down with a full-grown marrow, or possibly a crusty baguette, when I discovered that my birthday was the featured one in The Times’ birthday column on Thursday, at the bottom...
A few weeks ago I attended an astonishing concert given by the pianist Jacob Barnes and three of his friends from the Royal Academy of Music. Jacob had been suffering from a rare kind of leukaemia for two years. His presence on the platform was a source of wonder and...
The azaleas, camellias, magnolias and rhododendrons are nearly all out now in Richmond Park. Although most of the park is just green, there's an enclosed park-within-a-park called the Isabella Plantation. Why is it called Isabella? It seems that 'Isabel' is an word...
Here I am standing outside Jane Austen's house in Chawton, Hampshire. It was touching to see the quiet village in which Jane lived with her sister Cassandra and her mother, and to read about the circumstances which left the three of them dependent on the kindness of...
I probably would never have gone to the Lofoten Islands of Norway on my own initiative, but I was very glad that a music festival had summoned me there last week. Somehow I had imagined the islands as smaller and tamer than they really are. In fact, the scenery was...