The clocks went back last night, and we all had an extra hour in bed. This should have been ideal at the end of a day of recording Shostakovich. Recording is an arduous process and I was looking forward to relaxing when it was all over. But could I take advantage of that extra hour to have a nice long sleep? Oh no. The Shostakovich we’d just recorded went round and round in my head with remorseless clarity, especially the difficult bits. At 3am I gave myself a pep talk about how ridiculous it was to be practising tricky fingerings in my head when I’d already committed myself on disc. At 5am I started to reprise a different set of melodies and figurations from the day’s work. Round and round they went, round and round.
Unyoking the horses
Today's blog post is on quite a niche subject. When I was writing a short biography of pianist Sophie Menter (1846-1912) for Women...



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