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...
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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...
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...
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....
Hardly an unknown piece, of course, but there are aspects of it we don't often consider. For example, the pedalling! Debussy doesn't mark any. What are we to make of that? Some composers carefully mark where they want the pedal to be used. Some don't mark pedal at...
Over the years I've acquired various bits of piano music as gifts when friends were throwing away stuff they never played. That's how I came to have Edward MacDowell's Woodland Sketches. Most people know the first number, 'To a Wild Rose', but the rest of the set is...
I asked my husband if he knew Albeniz's Suite Española. 'Some of it', he said. Well, exactly. Some of the pieces in this Suite are popular - in versions for guitar or orchestra as well as the piano originals - but some are much less well known, as I realised when I...
... No, not the supermarket shelves! That's become well-nigh impossible in the coronavirus outbreak. As we're stuck at home, I've decided to explore some of the piano music I've had on my shelves for ages but never got around to learning. I have quite a few volumes of...
I have been reading an enthralling book, 'A Hundred Years in the Highlands', written in 1921 by Osgood Mackenzie. He was the founder and owner of the famous gardens at Inverewe. Osgood Mackenzie was an elderly man when he wrote the book and could recall childhood...
I haven't written much on my blog recently, for two reasons: 1. My website was hacked (aargh), and I have been struggling to deal with the technical issues that resulted. 2. I have been working on a new book. More of that in the new year! As we come to the end of the...
I did a piano workshop recently at which a number of different people played. One of our topics was tempo. How do you decide at what speeed to play something, especially if the composer gives no indication? Even written instructions such as Andante or Adagio are...
I've been a keen follower of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition for many years. This year it seems even more appealing as a distraction from what's going on with the Tory leadership contest and all the rest of it. It's remarkable to see how the twenty...
Last weekend I was at a dinner in Christ's College, Cambridge to celebrate 40 years of women in the college (founded 1505). Women have only been allowed to study at the University of Cambridge since 1869, when Girton College was founded. Newnham followed in 1872, but...
The season of Seville oranges has come to an end and with it the chance to make Seville marmalade, by general consensus the tastiest of all marmalades. We have tried making others with 'ordinary' oranges combined with lemon, grapefruit or lime, but nothing quite...