Someone asked me today whether my new book, Out of Silence, is a collection of my blog posts. It isn’t; the book was written a year before I had the idea of starting a website or a blog. I suppose the experience of writing ‘a pianist’s yearbook’ may have given me an appetite for more of the same, but the book and the blog don’t overlap. In any case the blog is much more about daily life.

The book was motivated by some of the questions which people ask after concerts, questions which imply that they imagine musicians taking brief sabbaticals from the Elysian Fields to come and sprinkle lovely music about like icing sugar, before skipping back to lie on a cloud and snooze. I’m still taken aback when people say things like, ‘Presumably, with your pianist’s hands, you never do the washing-up?’ I wanted the book to show something of how the real world and the artistic world interweave – for me at least.