This weekend I heard that my old friend Gerald Pointon had died. I felt like writing this little reminiscence. Gerald was a high-powered lawyer in Paris, specialising in arbitration. As a graduate student at Cambridge University he had sung in the famous choir of...
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I've been watching Channel 4's new series, 'The Piano', in which amateur piano-playing members of the public put themselves forward to come and play an upright piano in the foyer of one of Britain's main railway stations. Unknown to them, watching behind the scenes...
Last December my blog post about my favourite books of 2021 was quite popular, so here's another round-up of the best books I read in 2022. Once again it turns out that I read over fifty books, but some were re-readings, which either does or doesn't count, depending...
My piano, which I've had for almost thirty years, has just come back from a six-month trip to be renovated by Steinway in London. Before you ask, I wasn't without a piano for the whole of that time: they kindly lent me a very nice Steinway 'B' grand to tide me over....
I've just returned from the Gaudier Ensemble's annual festival at Cerne Abbas in Dorset (photo: the last piece of the final concert - the Dvorak piano quintet with (L to R) Marieke Blankestejn, Ulrike Janssen, me, Iris Juda and Henrik Brendstrup). One of the pleasures...
Sad news on New Year's Day. The very fine German cellist Christoph Marks has died unexpectedly of heart failure. Christoph (on the right of the photo) was the principal cello of the NDR Radiophilharmonie in Hannover, but we in Britain knew him best as principal cello...
Clearing out old files this week I came across an article called 'A Talk with Gyorgy Sebok', from a 1976 edition of Piano Quarterly. It was an interview of the Hungarian piano guru Gyorgy Sebok by a colleague, pianist Seth Carlin. Sebok taught in Indiana University;...
I'm back from the 26th annual festival of the Gaudier Ensemble in Dorset. Over the years this gathering of chamber music specialists from around Europe has come to feel quite special. As our lives have become increasingly complicated, it feels remarkable that each...
This morning there was a discussion on Radio 4 about the response of the arts in the UK to the Brexit vote. Contributors rightly said that there is much we can and must do to understand who we are, what are the social issues facing us, how can we forge a constructive...
In today's Guardian I have a letter which aroused quite a lot of interest when it appeared online yesterday. Please share it if you agree. Here's what I said: 'Much of the recent discourse around classical music and its troubles has contained a subtext of glee at the...
Last week I was in Rome, where I walked into a church one day to hear a group of about twenty nuns chanting an evening service. (I say 'chanting' because it wasn't exactly singing, nor was it exactly speaking, but some melodious hybrid of the two.) There was a small...
An exciting week lies ahead, with a whole cluster of works - nine, in fact - to perform in the space of four days. I'm doing a residency with the wonderful period-instrument quartet, Quatuor Mosaiques, in Perth Concert Hall (in Scotland, before any Australians start...
Last week I played a lunchtime recital in Aberdeen, the first time I'd played in the city for ages. I took a train early enough to allow me to see sunrise over the Firth of Forth, followed by a spectacular curve around the coastline of Fife as the first light was...
Over the Christmas holidays I've been talking with friends and family about the topic of my next book. I've got some ideas of my own, but one night someone suggested to me that I could 'crowd-source' ideas from people who read my blog. If 'crowd-source' seems a little...
I haven't written anything here for a while because I've been away at the International Musicians' Seminar 'Open Chamber Music' in Prussia Cove, Cornwall. We had a week of rehearsals in Prussia Cove (see photo), and then eight of us did a week of touring, giving five...