I've been remembering a little conversation which happened years ago when a fellow musician was giving me a lift to the Tube station in London. I was on my way to play a concert. As I was getting out of the car, he said to me: 'Have you got your music?' 'Yes.' 'Have...
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I have been going to events at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival. There seems to be a lot of overlap between the audiences, because I keep seeing the same faces. It's interesting to observe the effects that different performers have on the audiences. Some performers banter...
The other day I was talking about piano-playing with some very good amateur pianists. As it happens, they were all high-flyers in other professions. A surgeon was saying ruefully that people don't realise how much work it takes to be a very good amateur pianist,...
Zoom music-making has been a feature of lockdown. Hardly a week passes without someone sending me a link to a recording: Zoom choirs, Zoom orchestras and ensembles, each performer singing or playing away in their own home and on their own little screen. To create a...
We're hearing a lot about the days of heedless international travel being over for classical musicians. In today's Guardian, Charlotte Higgins does an admirable job of summing up some aspects of the situation. It's worth remembering that darting about to play in San...
Here's a neglected piece! Years ago, 'Rustle of Spring' was a favourite with amateur pianists, often of the older generation - 'Uncle So-and-So's party piece', to be trotted out (possibly in abridged form) at parties. But I haven't seen it on a concert programme for...
The other night, after watching the last in the category finals of 'BBC Young Musician', I tweeted that I had now watched the wind, brass and string finals and had not once heard them mention the name of any of the pianists who played with the young competitors. My...
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...
It's been eight weeks in lockdown now. (Photo: Edinburgh Castle with no visitors.) On the whole, I have been coping fine. Long experience of working at home had prepared me for #stayhome. However, it turns out that my peace of mind during solitary periods of...
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....
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 mentioned last weekend that I've been trying to learn Chopin's fourth ballade, a wonderful piece of music although not easy to master. After some days of quite intensive effort, I felt like having a rest from it. Some parts of it are very difficult, and day by day...
A music-loving friend and I were discussing the prospect of concerts resuming after lockdown. It might be months away, but most musicians are eagerly, indeed desperately looking forward to this point. 'Trouble is', said my friend, 'I might not feel all that confident...
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...