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...
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!
I've returned from London, where I recorded an album for Hyperion of piano music by some of the women featured in my book. I had a wonderful recording team. Incredibly, it's now 40 years since I first recorded an album with producer Andrew Keener, now a doyen of the...
News of the death of the wonderful comic actress Prunella Scales at the age of 93 has reminded me of a little anecdote in my first book, Beyond the Notes, in the section about touring Japan with the Florestan Trio in 2000. Twenty-five years ago! For context, I should...
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...
It's amazing how often the last movements of multi-movement works are a disappointment. Time and again, my chamber groups would bemoan the fact that the finale of whatever we were rehearsing wasn't as inspired as the rest of the piece. I once observed that composers...
A friend has sent me (in the post!) Richard Morrison's excellent Times article from April 3: 'Note to artists: it's not a sign of weakness to be unable to work now.' This is the link, but The Times is behind a paywall so you can only read it if you're a subscriber....