A friend and I have been discussing the career of a mutual friend who died recently. He was a fabulous musician who wasn't as well known as he should have been. Writers and visual artists can stay put in the place where they choose to live, and create their work...
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I have been keeping half an eye on the 2025 Van Cliburn piano competition in Texas, partly because when I was writing Women and the Piano I did a fair amount of research into the gender disparity one can see in the lists of piano competition prizewinners around the...
When you play a lot of Romantic piano music, you get used to the final notes being extended by a written pause. Composers like Chopin and Schumann often wanted the last chord to ring on gently (or triumphantly) while the mood of the piece hung in the air. We pianists...
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...
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...