An old friend of mine, a fellow musician, wrote to tell me about a lovely dream he had had. He, I and another musician friend were sitting in the branches of a cherry tree playing music together. 'The cherries were the notes!' he said. He didn't say what instrument I...
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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...
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...
I was complaining last week to a fellow musician about the difficulty of getting students to reply to emails. 'You'd think they would reply to email precisely because it's so easy to click on 'reply' and write a few words', I said. 'I have exactly the same problem',...
I've been in London coaching young post-grad and professional chamber groups for ChamberStudio, a wonderful enterprise which provides mentorship and further training for instrumentalists who have 'finished studying' but still need or wish to have access to advice and...
I've been reading the 'Childhood Memories' (published 1958) of Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, the Sicilian aristocrat and author of 'The Leopard', an award-winning Italian novel published posthumously and later made into a film starring Burt Lancaster. Lampedusa's...
One of my summer projects has been to learn all the Chopin Nocturnes. Strangely enough I have never tackled them properly, and some of them, it turns out, I hardly knew even by ear. Getting to know them has given me tremendous respect for Chopin's compositional skills...
Last night I was on the BBC Radio 4 arts programme Front Row, taking part in a discussion about playing from memory. Presenter Stig Abell spoke to me and Torun Saeter Stavseng, principal cellist of the Aurora Orchestra, who are about to perform Shostakovich's 9th...
I'm just back from a week at the Gaudier Ensemble's annual Cerne Abbas Music Festival in Dorset - my 25th year at the festival, I think. Some of the core players have been doing it for 28 years! But there are always new players and guest players, and this year we had...
I have been practising a lot of Schumann's music lately in preparation for various music festivals over the summer. It's always a pleasure to play Schumann and when you play a lot of different compositions, you get really into his way of thinking. His mindset feels...
I was away at the time of BBC Young Musician but have been catching up with the final instalments. As usual, I was tremendously impressed with the standard of playing in every instrumental category. Really, did my colleagues and I play as well as that when we were...
I'm back from chairing the jury at CIMCL, the Lyon International Chamber Music Competition. It was won by the Trio Messiaen from Paris, who swept the board with almost all of the available prizes. In 2nd place was the Trio Hélios, also from Paris, and in 3rd place was...
Over the last few days I have been checking the proofs of my new book, Speaking the Piano, due out in June from Boydell Press (see photo). Before we got to this point, there have been several other stages of editing. Various friends read the manuscript and gave their...
Just a month now until Winterplay, my mini-festival of chamber music in the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh. The weekend of six events is designed to bring in listeners of all ages. We start on the morning of 10 Feb with a children's 'music and movement' workshop run by...
I've been reading 'Tales and Travels of a School Inspector' by John Wilson, an account of travelling round the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the Victorian era, in the years after the groundbreaking 1872 Education Act which gave every child between the ages of 5...