In today's Guardian I was reading about the Japanese tradition of 'listening bars', where customers have 'a deep, beautiful, reverential attitude to listening to music'. High-end sound systems, sometimes dominating a whole wall, convey every layer of a recorded album...
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I've been playing through Schubert's piano sonatas, starting with the early ones, which I admit I don't know very well. Like most people, I'm much more familiar with the late sonatas, considered some of his finest works. The sonatas I've played so far were written in...
The other day when I was a little early for a meeting I climbed the steps to the Old Calton Burial Ground (see photo) to go and look at the monument to the philosopher David Hume. It's a kind of empty stone cylinder into which the sunlight shines, and is always...
Now back from the Gaudier Ensemble's festival, I'm preparing an all-Schumann recital programme for the Aspect Foundation at Leighton House in London on June 25. The Aspect Foundation aims to expand listeners' experience of concerts by inviting historians and...
We're now at Concert 2 in the annual Cerne Abbas Music Festival in Dorset, a feast of known and unknown chamber music, and a showcase for the Gaudier Ensemble, whose 24th festival it is. As time has gone by, and the players have moved further and further afield and...
In a lot of the teaching I've been doing recently, one theme has been running through the lessons. I find myself pointing out to one person after another that they are not actually doing what the composer asked. I don't mean in terms of notes - those are usually fine...
I was fortunate to be in the audience at the Finals of BBC Young Musician in the Usher Hall yesterday. What a treat! All three finalists showed a remarkable degree of poise, as well as a superb level of musicianship and skill. I was amazed by their calmness on the...
Here it is again, the heart-warming parade of talented young musicians competing to be BBC Young Musician of the Year. With every passing year it seems more remarkable that there is such a wellspring of young talent directed at classical music. It's tremendously...
I've just been in Italy, where as usual I tried to discover if there were any churches where one could hear some live sacred music on a Sunday, and once again was told that there is no longer any real tradition of church music performance in Italy, except for the...
A young musician friend has been telling me about a fully-funded chamber music group based in Denmark. Each member of the group, which is supported by the Danish Government to expand the reach of chamber music across the country, is paid a full salary and has...
I've been learning the piano part of the first piano quintet by Louise Farrenc, a 19th-century French woman composer who enjoyed a fine reputation in her day as a concert pianist and teacher as well as a composer. Unfortunately, at a time when the French music-loving...
I've been clearing out old boxes of letters dating from student days. In these days of email and texts, when most messages are brief and casual, it's amazing to sort through these handwritten letters. I'm struck by what a passion for communication we had. Whenever my...
Went to see the new Coen Brothers' film, Inside Llewyn Davis, the tale of a moderately successful American folk singer in 1961, on the cusp of the Bob Dylan era. After the death of his duo partner, Llewyn is trying to make it in Greenwich Village as a solo artist. The...
I'm getting ready for a trip to the Hochschule fuer Musik in Basel, where I'm giving three days of chamber music masterclasses on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. If you should be reading this in Basel, the classes are open to the public and take place from 10am-6pm each...
Yesterday I listened to a BBC Radio 4 programme about Henry Cole, the founder of the splendid V&A Museum in South Kensington. They were talking to a curator of the David Bowie exhibition, one of the most successful of the V&A's recent exhibitions. The curator...