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I’ve been writing this blog since 2009, but there still seem to be plenty of interesting topics to mull over. You can subscribe (it’s free) to follow the blog by email – each new post will pop into your inbox.
Wall Street Journal review
I mentioned a couple of days ago that my book was about to be published in the US. This morning I was delighted to find a generous review in the Wall Street Journal (see photo), headed 'Musical Light in the Darkness'. The link is this, but after a couple of paragraphs...
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‘Nocturnes’ comes out in the US today
Today my Nocturne book comes out in the US. I'm looking forward to having access to an enormous new group of potential readers. Yes, I know it will be of interest only to a certain subset of them - but still an enormous subset! I tell myself that a book like mine...
Can a piano retain a memory of who’s been playing it?
A friend of mine was talking about his lodger, a very fine student pianist who often practises on the piano in the house. My friend said to me, 'This may sound crazy, but when I play the piano after she's been practising, I often have the feeling that the piano is...
Watching the Queen’s Coronation on TV in 1953
Talk of how people are going to watch the King's Coronation next week has reminded me of my father's tale about Queen Elizabeth's Coronation in 1953. My father had recently moved to Scotland to marry my Scottish mother. Before coming to Edinburgh, my dad had been...
My old friend Gerald
This weekend I heard that my old friend Gerald Pointon had died. I felt like writing this little reminiscence. Gerald was a high-powered lawyer in Paris, specialising in arbitration. As a graduate student at Cambridge University he had sung in the famous choir of...
Posing on the steps of the Opera
Last week I was in Vienna for a few days of Easter holiday. We managed to pack in lots of music-related things: a concert at the Musikverein, an evening at the State Opera, a visit to one of Mozart's apartments, a visit to Haydn's house in what was the village of...
A belated review of ‘Out of Silence’
My 2010 book Out of Silence has received a decade-late review in American Record Guide - in the nicest possible way. Their reviewer Bruno Repp had written a long article about lesser-known piano music he thought readers would enjoy discovering. He ended with this...
American Record Guide review of ‘The Piano – a History in 100 Pieces’
I have just been sent an American review of my book The Piano - a History in 100 Pieces. The review actually came out a year ago, but I was not aware of it until now. A pity, as I would have liked to use a quote from it with the other quotes on the cover of the...
Mozart piano and violin sonatas download
This week I've been trying to find out what happened to the album of Mozart piano and violin sonatas that the wonderful Viennese violinist Erich Höbarth and I made in 2012. (That's us in the photo.) It was compiled from live recordings of a concert series we performed...
Channel 4’s ‘The Piano’
I've been watching Channel 4's new series, 'The Piano', in which amateur piano-playing members of the public put themselves forward to come and play an upright piano in the foyer of one of Britain's main railway stations. Unknown to them, watching behind the scenes...
‘Famously opaque world of classical music’
The other day I read a review in The Guardian of a book, 'In Good Hands', by conductor Alice Farnham, about the art and craft of conducting. I haven't read the book, but I was struck by several phrases the reviewer, Caroline Crampton, used when talking about classical...
Favourite books of 2022
Last December my blog post about my favourite books of 2021 was quite popular, so here's another round-up of the best books I read in 2022. Once again it turns out that I read over fifty books, but some were re-readings, which either does or doesn't count, depending...
Christmas cake decorations
We generally try to make our own decorations for our home-made Christmas cake. We used to attempt traditional scenes of snowmen, sledging, fir trees, snowballs etc. In recent years, after icing the cake, we've switched to making animals out of the leftover icing. Each...
Radio 3’s ‘Building a Library’ recommends recordings of the Ravel Piano Trio
BBC Radio 3's 'Record Review' programme this morning contained a 'Building a Library' feature on the Ravel Trio. Reviewer Jeremy Sams, a well-known Francophile, compared the available recordings. Mentioning the enormous technical difficulty of all three instrumental...
The fieldfares are back
Every winter at around this time, we see a kind of bird we never see at any other time of the year. Fieldfares, which are large thrushes, arrive from Scandinavia and eat the last of the berries on the rowan tree outside our kitchen window. First we notice that the...