We generally try to make our own decorations for our home-made Christmas cake. We used to attempt traditional scenes of snowmen, sledging, fir trees, snowballs etc. In recent years, after icing the cake, we've switched to making animals out of the leftover icing. Each...
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I'm preparing for a solo recital at Kettle's Yard museum in Cambridge on November 24th. Kettle's Yard is a beautiful little museum which began in the 1950s as a personal art collection by Jim Ede, who used his own house as the display venue. It was the first gallery I...
At the Edinburgh Festival this week we went to the Usher Hall to hear the French orchestra Les Siècles performing Stravinsky's Rite of Spring on instruments of the period. (The difference in those instruments was not immediately apparent, though there was a soft grain...
Spring seems to be arriving late this year, but my favourite spot in London for spring colours, the Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park, is defying the cold weather and starting to look fabulous. Whoever planted the azaleas here was a genius of gardening. This year...
On Saturday 11 May I'm presenting an edition of BBC Radio 3's Saturday Classics programme from 2-4pm, with my choice of recordings. There's some Fauré, Schumann, Chopin, Saint-Saens, Josef Strauss, Billy Mayerl, a couple of pieces of Mozart, and the Bill Evans Trio...
A chance encounter after a recent concert gave me the chance to visit the beautifully refurbished Savoy Hotel at the invitation of Jon Nickoll, the pianist in the famous American Bar. I've long wanted to visit the Savoy, where Billy Mayerl made his name as the young...
We have been in snowy Vienna, where we were invited to hear a performance of Beethoven's opera 'Fidelio' in the very theatre where it was premiered (see photo). We were sitting right behind Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the conductor. It was thrilling to be in the Theater an...
Yesterday I gave some coaching to the Minerva Piano Trio, who had brought the first version of Brahms's B major Trio opus 8. He composed it around 1853-54, at the time when he first got to know the Schumanns, Clara and Robert. It's well known that he became very close...
Out of the blue has come a letter from the Worshipful Company of Musicians, telling me that I have been awarded the 2013 Walter Wilson Cobbett Medal for distinguished services to chamber music. WW Cobbett was a successful businessman whose true passion was chamber...
On Christmas Day I was sorry to hear that the composer Richard Rodney Bennett had died in his adopted home, New York. RRB and I had been in touch since I made my Billy Mayerl disc. He wrote to me out of the blue to say how much he liked it. I was thrilled to get a...
More reviews of my book 'Out of Silence', translated into Japanese by Noriko Ogawa, have arrived from Tokyo. I must say these Japanese reviews are absolutely my favourites so far. Their flavour suggests Noriko was right when she said that Japanese people would be on...
Today is the launch of 'Astar', a lovely Royal Scottish National Orchestra CD (see photo) on which I play the piano. 'Astar' is the Gaelic word for 'journey'. The RSNO's brilliant idea, funded by Creative Scotland, is to give every child born in Scotland, from October...
Here are Erich Höbarth and me rehearsing Mozart at the Wigmore Hall yesterday for our concert last night. Having done all our rehearsals in my small piano room at home, it was thrilling to transfer to the Wigmore stage and to hear the music sail out into the gorgeous...
On my last evening in Prussia Cove, I was asked to say a few words after supper about the guiding ethos of the place as envisaged by violinist Sandor Vegh, who started the International Musicians' Seminars forty years ago. I stood up in the dining room by candlelight...
I’m down by the sea in Prussia Cove in Cornwall, at the autumn chamber music seminar of the International Musicians’ Seminar, from which I have had an unaccountably long break. I remember thinking I’d have a little rest from it for a year or two. All of a sudden it...