On Sunday of this week I’ll be playing a programme of piano music by historical women pianists at the London International Piano Festival at King’s Place. Mine is the closing concert of the festival, at 3pm on 6th October. If you live in or near London, please consider coming along. After the concert there will be a Q&A on stage with me talking to Tim Parry of International Piano magazine.

This is the last time this year that I’m playing my all-female programme of music written by the pianists featured in my book Women and the Piano. During the year I’ve played it, or variations of it, at the Wigmore Hall, the Edinburgh Book Festival, St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, and the Lammermuir Festival as well as at several house concerts. I’ve tried to vary it from one occasion to the next, and this Sunday’s programme is a combination of pieces I haven’t actually played together in concert before. The whole programme can be seen here.

It’s been a lot of work to research these pieces, devise programmes, learn the pieces to concert standard and memorise them. But I have enjoyed introducing audiences to some very good piano music they didn’t know before.

I did make sure to choose the best pieces I could, because I didn’t want anyone to be able to say, ‘Well, there you are, no wonder this music hasn’t been much played’. In fact, I think audiences have been struck by the quality of the music, and just as much by the realisation that they had been unaware of the lives and works of some of these female composers.

I shall try to do some more research so that I can come up with new programmes of music by historical women. There are still plenty of people who have heard very little of it!