I’ve returned from London, where I recorded an album for Hyperion of piano music by some of the women featured in my book. I had a wonderful recording team. Incredibly, it’s now 40 years since I first recorded an album with producer Andrew Keener, now a doyen of the recording scene.

Recording is such hard work, in a different kind of way from anything else I usually do. In concerts I try to drop all my detailed practising thoughts into the background and focus on the shape and the musical feeling. I don’t tend to mind if there are little fluffs here and there – it all feels part of live music-making.

In a recording, however – a considered studio recording rather than the recording of a live concert – it’s not appropriate to allow little fluffs, outright mistakes and extraneous noises to be captured forever by the microphones. This becomes quickly evident once you’ve recorded a few things and listened back to them along with the producer and the sound engineer. Annoying ‘little’ errors are writ very large. You really don’t want to hear them on the finished product. So, back to the piano to try again. And try not to make the piano stool creak this time!

I find the process not unlike that of proofreading a book. You have one ear on the musical shape and sense, and another on the fine details as they pass by. You know that very note has to be perfect at some point. So your brain seems to slow down and check every note or chord for accuracy as it passes by. Obviously this kind of close listening is difficult to combine with getting carried away by the music. There does seem to be a sweet spot where you’re aware of detail but also able to focus on the longer arc (usually after recording the same passage multiple times). It’s probably never as carefree as it can be in concert, but with luck one can get satisfying ‘complete takes’ into which small corrections can be dropped during the editing process.

Photo shows the team: producer Andrew Keener, me, page-turner Peter Avis and sound engineer Oscar Torres. Thank you to all of them for making this such a pleasant experience!