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...
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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...
I've been gradually playing through the whole volume of Mozart piano sonatas, and the other day I reached the B flat Sonata, K333. This piece holds unpleasant memories for me because when I was doing my O-levels, or Highers, I forget which, I had to perform some of it...
Yesterday I was at the Guildhall School of Music. The Guildhall School must have the most thoroughly urban location of any of the London music colleges, secreted as it is within a forest of City skyscrapers so closely packed and so overwhelmingly monochrome that the...
Winter weather has suddenly arrived in London. There is ice on the smaller ponds frost on the bushes, and low winter sunshine striking dramatically through the trees. This week Erich Hoebarth and I - me in London and him in Vienna - are trying to go through all the...
Erich Höbarth and I are travelling down to Bath today to prepare for our concert in the Mozartfest on Saturday morning. Our programme is all of Mozart, interspersing duo sonatas with piano solos, but it's a different programme to the all-Mozart one we played in the...
In a second-hand bookstore last week I came across the cello part of Beethoven's late string quartets. Just the cello part - the other parts were missing. It was cheap, and I bought it out of curiosity. Looking through it when I got home, I was struck by how...
I have been coaching on the Marryat Chamber Music autumn course, which ended last night with a wonderful concert (see photo). I find it immensely cheering that such talented, accomplished young musicians obviously love chamber music so much and are determined to make...
On my last evening in Prussia Cove, I was asked to say a few words after supper about the guiding ethos of the place as envisaged by violinist Sandor Vegh, who started the International Musicians' Seminars forty years ago. I stood up in the dining room by candlelight...
Today’s Guardian article about former concert pianist Anne Naysmith, who lives in a little shelter made of trees and bushes at the foot of a railway embankment in west London, got me thinking about pianists. As the article points out, her case has echoes of the...
Last night we watched the Olympics closing ceremony, basically a long pop concert with eccentric dance interludes. I assume that the singers couldn't really hear their support groups or backing tracks in the enormous stadium - at least, I'm giving them the benefit of...
The Olympic medal ceremonies have proved a parade ground for the national anthems of lots of different countries. And what a lamentable bunch these anthems are, from a musical point of view. I've been struck by how most of them fail to give the slightest flavour of...
I'm having trouble getting used to the loud music which is played at the Olympics between events and even during pauses and breaks in the action. Last night we watched (on TV) a women's basketball match with pop music carefully choreographed to plug any moments of...
The other day I went to an orchestral concert, at the end of which the conductor held up a hand for silence and made an emotional speech about how this kind of music needs our support more than ever, because classical musicians feel 'marginalised'. He said that young...
This morning in the park I was trying to take moody silhouettes of my old friends the Egyptian geese (see photo). 'I wonder where the word 'silhouette' comes from?' I said to Bob. He thought for a moment and replied, 'Probably named after Alphonse Silhouette, the...