Last night I appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, discussing my latest book with broadcaster Kate Molleson (see picture of me turning away from the piano after playing one of the pieces we were talking about). Conversation turned to the idea of...
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The other day I was part of a coffee gathering where people from various lines of work were talking about their experiences of writing 'risk assessments'. They described the complicated forms that had to be filled in and the efforts to explain what preventive measures...
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...
During lunch in a tiny village in the forests of Le Sidobre, in Languedoc, we got into conversation with an elderly lady who told us that she spoke Occitan as a child, before she was required to learn French. At our request, she spoke some Occitan to us, the only time...
An exhibition of artistic sculptures based on pink garlic – how could I resist when I saw the poster outside the tourist office in Lautrec? Pink garlic is a local speciality, but despite its undoubted charms it didn't seem a promising material for sculpture. I...
The Ambialet piano course ended last night with concerts by the participants (see some of them in the photo). It never ceases to amaze me how people manage to raise their game in these circumstances, even though most of them find it a nerve-racking experience and...
