I've been watching the BBC Young Musician competition on television for many years now. Slowly, the competition has slipped from the major channels and is now shown on BBC4, whose output currently seems to consist of repeats, archive material and cultural things that...
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Tomorrow I'm playing a solo recital at the Lammermuir Festival, a lovely festival which takes place in various locations, sacred and secular, across the beautiful county of East Lothian in Scotland. I have practised my programme to the point of feeling a keen desire...
The other day I came across an article called 'The Pianoforte Recital'. It was published in The Musical Times in 1911 - over a century ago. The author, Frederick Kitchener (himself a pianist), complained that piano recitals had become far too numerous, and that...
I’m off to Vienna to rehearse four programmes of Mozart’s music which violinist Erich Höbarth and I are playing this season in Perth Concert Hall, Scotland's newest concert hall (our first concert is on November 11). We’re tackling twelve of Mozart’s sonatas for piano...
To a talk at the Guildhall School of Music about musicians' injuries. 'Suffering for their Art', presented by Helen Reid, explored the complex topic of how performers deal with injuries which prevent them from playing their instruments. It seems that musicians are...
In the wake of the Trondheim competition, I’ve been thinking about the gap between the jury’s taste and the public’s taste in performers. Several times during the competition I happened to bump into members of the public in the coffee shop, or in the foyers of the...
Yesterday on the flight home from Norway, our flight crew announced that the airline had just installed free WiFi on certain planes, including ours. As I had a laptop with me I was able to send my first e-mail from the sky. Even more amazingly, a reply pinged straight...
This week I'm on the jury of the Trondheim International Chamber Competition, which this year is for piano trios. During the day we've been listening to nine piano trios playing very demanding programmes, and in the evenings we've been rehearsing for and playing in...
Went to the Wigmore Hall to hear American jazz pianist Brad Mehdau in duo with mandolinist Chris Thile. It was a tremendous evening, and also an opportunity to witness quite a different sort of crowd in the Wigmore. They were, I have to admit, younger and cooler than...
Usually I take part in music festivals, so to be invited to a Literary Festival is an exciting change. Yesterday I was at the Rye Festival talking about music and musicians. In between readings and bits of talk, I played little piano pieces. I'd been given one of...
At the weekend, several newspapers carried photos of thieves in China using chopsticks to pick people’s pockets as they browsed market stalls. The chopsticks are used essentially to make the thief’s fingers much longer and thinner – a sort of variant on the Edward...
I’ve been in Italy for a few days. One evening I went to a concert in the courtyard of a lovely historic building in Bologna. The Italians are so lucky to have so many of these theatrical spaces and the climate which makes it possible to sit there, in the balmy air,...
A friend was telling me about a piano recital he attended last year in the Wigmore Hall. During a Beethoven sonata, members of the audience were distracted by a low buzzing noise emanating from somewhere in the room, and judging by the pianist's increasingly cross...
I practise the piano in a room at the front of the house. People walk past in the street all the time, and I’ve always been amazed at how few of them turn their heads in the direction of the sound, or appear to notice it at all. I mentioned this recently to a concert...
A thoughtful letter today from a reader about recordings. He’s noticed that musicians often say they dislike the manicured, edited-to-within-an-inch-of-their-lives recordings of today, and prefer the more ‘natural’, warts-and-all approach of the earlier twentieth...