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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...
I have done an interview for the 'Brainland' podcast, a series 'where neuroscience, the arts and humanities mingle'. An old college friend, doctor and cellist Steve Brown, interviewed me about how I got started in music, how I got into chamber music, what motivates...
I didn’t manage to catch many of the programmes charting the progress of BBC Young Musician of the Year 2010, but I’m proud to say that I did pick out the eventual winner, 16-year-old pianist Lara Omeroglu, when she first appeared in a keyboard category final. Not...
My remarks about the red daisies which bent, but did not break as the lawn mower passed by, have caused some interesting correspondence. People have pointed out that several old civilisations realised the wisdom of bending in order to avoid breaking. A friend tells...
Listening to a jazz radio station as we made dinner, I was surprised to hear the announcer describe every track as ‘a song’, even though the programme was a sequence of purely instrumental tracks. ‘What’s your next song?’ he kept saying to his guest, who’d reply...
Unusual flowers have appeared in our little lawn this year. Violets, which we’ve never seen in the garden before, and daisies which are bright pink or deep red (see photo). When it was time to mow the lawn, we sorrowfully bade them farewell. The lawn was also full of...
I’ve just finished reading ‘Julie and Julia’, an entertaining account of Julie Powell’s year spent cooking her way through Julia Child’s 1961 ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’, the book which famously opened the American public’s eyes to the art and style of...
Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday, dear website, Happy birthday to you! This blog 'went live' one year ago today. To mark the occasion, what better than a photo of the cherry blossom which has just come out in the garden? The first...
We attended a funeral in a small church this week. As we sat waiting for the service to begin, an organist was stumbling through some well-known hymns, their outlines blurred by a haze of wrong notes. Though I tell myself to lighten up, I find I’m very impatient...
Like most other people in Britain I've been relishing the sudden quietness resulting from the closure of our airspace because of a drifting cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland. On Saturday I sat in the garden for ages, because it felt so special to be sitting under...
My piano tuner asks whether I'm happy to keep my piano at the usual pitch, A=440. Yes. Why wouldn’t I be? Well, he says, some British orchestras are now asking for pianos to be tuned at A=442 Hz. Now that there’s so much musical traffic between countries, we’re under...
Last night we watched an enjoyable BBC4 programme, ‘The Great American Songbook’. Various artists such as Paolo Nutini, Melody Gardot, Krystle Warren, Gwyneth Herbert, José James and my own personal favourite, Claire Martin gave us their own, updated versions of...
At the moment I have seven or eight new pieces on the music desk of my piano. I have to learn them all by the summer. Some are works I’ve never heard played, and in such cases I find it helpful to listen to a recording before I start work. The internet has made things...
Bob and I were arguing over breakfast about the theme tune at the end of ‘Frasier’. We’re working our way through a box set and enjoying the Frasier ambience all over again. But we had rather different memories of what notes he sings to the words ‘tossed salad and...
