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...
I'm pleased to say that my audience for the Beethoven lecture-recital yesterday was much bigger than I or the organisers had anticipated. Extra chairs needed to be put out, and there was a lovely buzz in the room when I came in. It seemed that people were pleased by...
I'm preparing for a lunchtime lecture-recital on Tuesday in which I've been asked to speak about, and then play, a late Beethoven sonata, the A flat major opus 110. It's an experiment for all concerned; I've performed the sonata before, but have never tried to speak...
I've been reading the wonderful 'Memoirs of a Highland Lady', written by Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus. What a series of unforgettable pictures she paints of her life in the Highlands of Scotland in the early years of the 19th century! As a teenager, I used to get...
At New Year we played a game we hadn't played for ages - Ex Libris. It's a game where all the players have to write the opening or closing sentence of a book which already exists. Each player in turn selects a book from the shelves (obviously you have to have lots of...
I've been listening to recordings of pieces I'm currently working on. One is a Moment Musical by Schubert, represented by many different performances, including a YouTube clip of Horowitz playing it in front of a rapt audience in, I think, Carnegie Hall. Horowitz's...
Dame Fanny Waterman, who is standing down from the Leeds Piano Competition she co-founded in 1961, has caused quite a storm with her remarks about the decline of piano-playing in the UK. She attributes this partly to the growing popularity of electric pianos ('a waste...
There's been a lot in the press recently about coughing in classical concerts, and whether it's acceptable or not. We classical musicians (and listeners) tend to get upset about performances being marred by loud coughing. However, compared with some musicians, I...
Readers who followed my enthusiastic recommendation of 'The Real Charlotte' may be interested in another recommendation from the same period. I've just finished reading 'Maurice Guest', published in 1908 by Henry Handel Richardson, the pseudonym of Ethel Richardson,...
Lots of people have written to me today about coughing. Why? Because of a BBC News report about violinist Kyung-Wha Chung's comeback recital at the Festival Hall in London. She was disturbed by a child coughing in the audience, and remonstrated with the parents. Her...
The current series of 'Masterchef Professionals' has provoked quite a lot of interaction between musicians (mostly on Twitter) commenting on how unprepared the competitors seem to be for the cookery challenges which await them. Time after time, in the 'technical...
An interesting discussion the other night with a bunch of student pianists. We were discussing the kind of situation where you have to perform several different pieces in a row without being able to leave the stage. This is sometimes the case in, for example, a...
This morning I listened to a longish discussion on Radio 4's 'Today' programme about the technique of singing with a microphone. Many singers today use headsets rather than microphones when they perform, because headsets allow them to have their hands free. To my...