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...
Interested in what Susan has to say about all things classical music? Subscribe below and whenever Susan writes a new blog post you will be notified by email. Simple!
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,...
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...
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...
If you google the 'Minute' Waltz, you'll find that it is a 'song by Arthur Rubinstein', which would have come as a surprise to Frédéric Chopin. In the UK the waltz (in D flat, opus 64 no 1) is famous because it's the signature tune of the long-running BBC radio show...
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...
This is the second in my series about exploring some of the piano music I have neglected on my shelves. Today's discovery is Schubert - in particular, the realisation that he wasn't always the effortless master he became! I sat down to play through his early piano...
The coronavirus situation is constantly changing. Many people's plans have already been impacted by it, even though in Scotland, where I live, there are just a few cases at the moment. In the past few days I've had several worried concert promoters on the phone about...
Everyone sees Brexit through their own lens. This is mine. When I was small, playing the piano was my favourite thing. I had heard that Mozart and Schubert came from Austria. Bach and Beethoven and Schumann came from Germany. Debussy and Ravel came from France. And so...
At a new year party I had an interesting chat with a young man who likes music and likes to listen to it at university along with his friends. He himself likes classical music among other kinds. Many of his friends are not familiar with the world of classical music,...
A little while ago I wrote about my sudden insight that most printed fingering in the scores of piano pieces was probably devised by men, and for male pianists. Yesterday I had some follow-up to that from a doctor who had done some further reading about male and...
Yesterday I was at a concert where, just as I was thinking of reading the programme notes, the lights went down and I couldn't read them. Some concert halls don't put the lights down; others dim them slightly, and some put them down to 'theatre levels', just leaving...
Phew! That was indeed a two-piano marathon at the London Piano Festival. Looking tired but happy after the three-hour concert last Saturday night in King's Place are, from left to right, Christian Ihle Hadland, Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen (co-directors of the...