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...
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I have been keeping half an eye on the 2025 Van Cliburn piano competition in Texas, partly because when I was writing Women and the Piano I did a fair amount of research into the gender disparity one can see in the lists of piano competition prizewinners around the...
When you play a lot of Romantic piano music, you get used to the final notes being extended by a written pause. Composers like Chopin and Schumann often wanted the last chord to ring on gently (or triumphantly) while the mood of the piece hung in the air. We pianists...
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...
The other day the Guardian published a front-page article about the startling number of people of all ages who suffer from mental health problems, such as depression, without receiving any treatment. It was suggested that the cost of drug treatments and cognitive...
I went to a wine and cheese tasting session the other night in an atmospheric old building in Edinburgh. All the cheeses were made in Scotland. The evening was fun, but over rather quickly. One wine followed hard on the heels of another and I rather wished there had...
Although I take no interest in tennis the rest of the year, when this time of year rolls around I suddenly get very involved in watching tennis from the Wimbledon Championships. I become so interested that I wonder why I don't continue to follow the fortunes of these...
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...