On Saturday there was a lovely article in The Guardian about Paul Barton, a man who plays the piano to elephants at an elephant sanctuary in Thailand. The elephants have often been overworked or mistreated before they come to the sanctuary, but it seems that they...
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At a book sale at the weekend I picked up a copy of Heinrich Neuhaus's book The Art of Piano Playing. Neuhaus, who devoted the main part of his career to teaching at the Moscow Conservatory, was the teacher of Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels and Radu Lupu among...
Last week I took part in the Cerne Abbas Music Festival, held by the Gaudier Ensemble in rural Dorset. For the past thirty-two years, the same group of musicians has been gathering in Cerne for a week in the summer, to present a series of chamber music concerts in the...
This week we watched Amy Berg's 2015 documentary about Janis Joplin, 'Little Girl Blue', which tells Janis's story with the help of letters she wrote to her family while on tour. It's an absorbing watch, full of great footage, excellent interviews with her family,...
Last night, on Burns' Night, my book group met on Zoom to read Robert Burns' poem 'Tam O'Shanter'. Several members of the group had grown up taking part in annual Burns recitations on January 25, with prizes given for the best or most dramatic performances. They...
Last weekend, reading the Guardian Review, I was struck by a comment of Joe Moran's about having learned to play the spoons in lockdown. I was vaguely aware of spoons as musical instruments, but a bit of research put me in the picture: spoons have long been used to...
One positive aspect of this year's lockdowns has been seeing more wildlife in the city's green spaces. Earlier in the year, when there was very little traffic, animals seemed to pluck up courage to venture on to the quiet golf courses, parks and hillsides. We saw lots...
On Monday, cellist Philip Higham and I played one of the first post-lockdown concerts for a socially distanced live audience at Wigmore Hall (see photo). At first, we had been told that only 56 people would be allowed in the audience, but the rules changed and we were...
On Monday, 14 September at 7.30pm, cellist Philip Higham and I will be stepping in at short notice to play a duo recital at Wigmore Hall in London. We're replacing two artists caught up in quarantine rules. With countries hopping on and off the quarantine list, the...
Most people who learn piano will have come across Bach's Two-Part Inventions, but their eyes may not have alighted on his Foreword. Mine hadn't until the other day. 'Forthright instruction, wherewith lovers of the clavier, especially those eager to learn, are shown in...
This is probably the penultimate in my lockdown series about neglected music on my shelves. It has been a helpful focus for me during a phase when more people had time to read. As we start to come out of lockdown, it seems right to wrap it up. I'll try to get to...
Here's a curious piece from the late Baroque, composed by an 18th century Spanish priest who was a contemporary of Scarlatti. Padre Antonio Soler began studying music at his local monastery when he was only six, and by 14 had his first appointment as a cathedral...
Recently, at a Zoom meeting of my piano club, one of our members played Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Petite Suite de Concert. It was new to most of us, but we were all struck by its charm. I remember being puzzled when I first heard of a composer called Samuel Coleridge...
Francis Poulenc is one of those composers whose personality shows very clearly in his music. Some composers, you sense, enjoy the process of creating a pure compositional line swept clean of their personal feelings. We may know from reading their biographies that they...
Volume One of Mendelssohn's complete solo piano music is on my music desk. Mendelssohn was an astonishingly precocious chap and wrote some of his finest music - the Octet for Strings, for example - when still a teenager. He was first and foremost a pianist, so it's...