Recently I visited my old college in Cambridge to give a recital. While I was there, I took the opportunity to attend two services of Evensong in the college chapel. As always, hearing sacred music sung in those glorious surroundings (see photo) was a striking...
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We often walk up past a farm in the Braid Hills where swallows gather each year to make their nests and raise their young. Usually the birds arrive in early May, and until they leave in August for their journey to Africa, we visit the farm regularly to see how they're...
I go to quite a lot of concerts given by amateur musicians - partly because there's a big amateur music scene in the city where I live, and partly because I often have friends and neighbours playing in the concerts. Of course my particular interest is piano. It dawned...
Recently I've had to memorise various piano pieces by Schubert. I find his music unusually hard to memorise, for a reason that throws light on why it is so profoundly satisfying. Composers often use themes or musical material which they bring back later in the piece....
Two recent topics of conversation have come together in my mind to prompt a question. Topic 1: the number of classical concert reviews is shrinking rapidly. Everyone in the profession has noticed it. Many newspapers are reducing the number of classical reviews they...
We have a lovely cat, Daisy, whom we 'rescued' from a cat shelter. Shortly after she moved in, another cat got in through the catflap one evening. We were out and didn't see what happened, but the two cats had clearly had an epic struggle. Clumps of cat fur were on...
At the weekend I had an unusual experience. Following the conclusion of BBC Young Musician and viewers' anger that the result was so under-reported, I wrote a letter to The Guardian about the wider issue. We've heard a lot recently about orchestras folding, opera...
In today's Guardian I have a letter which aroused quite a lot of interest when it appeared online yesterday. Please share it if you agree. Here's what I said: 'Much of the recent discourse around classical music and its troubles has contained a subtext of glee at the...
BBC Young Musician came to a close last night with the wonderful young cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason being declared the winner after his remarkably mature and thoughtful performance of Shostakovich's first cello concerto. His charming, modest response on being asked how...
BBC Young Musician is underway on BBC4, and once again the talent and accomplishment of the young players is absolutely admirable. To watch and listen to them is inspiring and gives one great hope for the next generation of classical musicians. Having said that, I am...
Last week I was in Rome, where I walked into a church one day to hear a group of about twenty nuns chanting an evening service. (I say 'chanting' because it wasn't exactly singing, nor was it exactly speaking, but some melodious hybrid of the two.) There was a small...
I'm reading Ben Ratliff's 'Every Song Ever', an intriguing guide to how to get the most out of the huge range of recorded music now freely available. If I understand him correctly, he feels that there has been a shift from 'the composer' to 'the listener' at the top...
In my travels as a guest tutor I come across post-grad and young professional musicians from lots of different countries. For some time now I've made it a habit to ask them how they're getting on with making their way in the classical music profession - easy or...
A young musician announced to me recently that the problem of classical music's dwindling audiences would be solved by moving concerts into exciting new locations not associated with classical performance. For example, she mentioned the MultiStory project, an...
A wonderful night on Monday at the Queen's Hall playing Schubert with violinist Erich Höbarth (see photo). We were pleasantly surprised by the size of the audience and even more so by their warmth. After such a long build-up to this particular concert it felt very...