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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.
Watching the Van Cliburn piano competition
I have been keeping half an eye on the 2025 Van Cliburn piano competition in Texas, partly because when I was writing Women and the Piano I did a fair amount of research into the gender disparity one can see in the lists of piano competition prizewinners around the...
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The difficulty of ending in tempo and without a pause
When you play a lot of Romantic piano music, you get used to the final notes being extended by a written pause. Composers like Chopin and Schumann often wanted the last chord to ring on gently (or triumphantly) while the mood of the piece hung in the air. We pianists...
Brian Kellock, great Scottish jazz pianist, has died
Very sad news that the Scottish jazz pianist Brian Kellock died last night. Brian was revered in the Scottish jazz world and far beyond. I didn't know him well, but I had got to know him a bit through attending his Sunday afternoon performances (with double bassist...
Richard Rodney Bennett
On Christmas Day I was sorry to hear that the composer Richard Rodney Bennett had died in his adopted home, New York. RRB and I had been in touch since I made my Billy Mayerl disc. He wrote to me out of the blue to say how much he liked it. I was thrilled to get a...
masterclasses – save the date
Winter sausages
I always rather dread this time of year, when cold weather makes my hands feel stiff. Before sitting down to play the piano, I often have to run a basin of warm water and stand with my hands in the water for a few minutes. My piano stands next to an unused fireplace....
Bavarian Radio
An old friend writes from Switzerland to tell me that he was glancing through the newspaper this morning when his eye fell on the radio schedules, and he saw that there was to be a broadcast about me this evening on Bavarian Radio. I'm today's focus in their...
City blues
Yesterday I was at the Guildhall School of Music. The Guildhall School must have the most thoroughly urban location of any of the London music colleges, secreted as it is within a forest of City skyscrapers so closely packed and so overwhelmingly monochrome that the...
The red pencil
Winter weather has suddenly arrived in London. There is ice on the smaller ponds frost on the bushes, and low winter sunshine striking dramatically through the trees. This week Erich Hoebarth and I - me in London and him in Vienna - are trying to go through all the...
‘One of the best books of 2012’
My book 'Out of Silence', in the Japanese translation by Noriko Ogawa, has just been chosen by 'Chopin' magazine in Japan as one of the best books of 2012. It's been such a pleasure to correspond with my various Japanese editors and readers, some of whom have sent me...
Mozartfest/Sunday Times review
'At the Guildhall [during the Bath Mozartfest], pianist Susan Tomes joined forces with the Viennese fiddler Erich Hoebarth for an all-Mozart programme of four sonatas for 'fortepiano with violin accompaniment' and one of his most significant fragments, Fantasia in C...
Cormorants
A group of cormorants arrived on our local pond this week. They stood drying their wings in the sun, monopolising a floating platform which had been abandoned in a hurry by the smaller, meeker birds who usually potter about on it. Close up, cormorants look like...
Changing loyalties
We took our Viennese visitor to Richmond Park for a walk in the winter sunshine. He was enchanted to see the deer roaming freely in the park, quite close at hand (see photo). While we were watching this group of deer, we witnessed a 'raid' by another stag. He ran up...
Bath Mozartfest tomorrow
Erich Höbarth and I are travelling down to Bath today to prepare for our concert in the Mozartfest on Saturday morning. Our programme is all of Mozart, interspersing duo sonatas with piano solos, but it's a different programme to the all-Mozart one we played in the...
Sum of the parts
In a second-hand bookstore last week I came across the cello part of Beethoven's late string quartets. Just the cello part - the other parts were missing. It was cheap, and I bought it out of curiosity. Looking through it when I got home, I was struck by how...