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...
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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 now finished working my way through the volume of Mozart piano sonatas (a sonata a day keeps the doctor away) and have started playing through Beethoven's again. The early Beethoven sonatas have made me think about what makes the difference between a theme and a...
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...
I've been practising Schumann's 'Papillons', a cycle of piano pieces containing various motifs and references which reappear in his later piano music. It seems that for Schumann, butterflies were associated with the novels of Jean Paul, one of his favourite authors,...