I've been re-reading the great James Thurber's The Years with Ross, an account of the time he spent working for the New Yorker magazine in the 1920s, 30s and 40s under its founder and chief editor, Harold Ross. It's a joyously detailed and entertaining account of the...
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I've been reading An Angel at my Table, the autobiography of New Zealand writer Janet Frame. It's an unusual and absorbing read. Janet Frame grew up without much access to music, but when she first came across classical music she loved it. Gradually she gathered some...
I seem to have read an unusually high number of books this year - surprising, because it was a unusually busy year. Looking back, I realise that long train journeys provided hours of reading time. I often took two books with me on a trip in order not to run out of...
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...
I have tons of piano music by Schumann and in lockdown I've been working through the volumes. Now, I've always been a huge fan of Schumann, but I have to admit that when you spend a day going through some of his, shall we say, less focused piano music you become very...
Another find in a secondhand book sale was a volume of Dvorak Humoresques. Who knew there were eight of them for piano? I confess I only really knew the Humoresque made famous by Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz and others in arrangements for violin and piano....
I do have some volumes of Haydn piano sonatas, but I confess I didn't realise until quite recently that they didn't contain all his sonatas. In a charity book sale, I came across a slim volume of selected Haydn sonatas which contained a couple of early works I don't...
A sad one today! In the course of reading about the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, I came across the fact that American composer Felix Arndt had died at the age of only 29 during the second wave of the pandemic in New York. I couldn't help being struck by this,...
I'm trying to learn some new pieces during this lockdown. My latest project is Chopin's Fourth Ballade. I've half-known it for years, but never tried to learn it properly. It requires quite a big stretch, which I don't have, and I've never been sure I could get my...
Over the past week or two, as a lockdown project, I've been playing through all Mozart's piano sonatas. There are eighteen of them, mostly in three movements. Mozart is my favourite composer. His piano writing is always of a high standard. After all, he was a famous...