Blog
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.
FT Best Summer Books of 2024
My book on women pianists has been chosen by the Financial Times as one of their Best Summer Books of 2024. Music critic Richard Fairman made it one of his choices. It's very gratifying to find the book being noticed by a wider circle - I suppose because of the...
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Wall Street Journal reviews my book
This weekend my book Women and the Piano is reviewed by Diane Cole in the Wall Street Journal. I don't think my books have ever come to the attention of the WSJ before, so I am delighted to be included. Only subscribers can read the full review, but this link at least...
A podcast for the ‘Brainland’ series
I have done an interview for the 'Brainland' podcast, a series 'where neuroscience, the arts and humanities mingle'. An old college friend, doctor and cellist Steve Brown, interviewed me about how I got started in music, how I got into chamber music, what motivates...
Not polite to listen
I practise the piano in a room at the front of the house. People walk past in the street all the time, and I’ve always been amazed at how few of them turn their heads in the direction of the sound, or appear to notice it at all. I mentioned this recently to a concert...
Warts-and-all recordings
A thoughtful letter today from a reader about recordings. He’s noticed that musicians often say they dislike the manicured, edited-to-within-an-inch-of-their-lives recordings of today, and prefer the more ‘natural’, warts-and-all approach of the earlier twentieth...
Peyro Clabado
During lunch in a tiny village in the forests of Le Sidobre, in Languedoc, we got into conversation with an elderly lady who told us that she spoke Occitan as a child, before she was required to learn French. At our request, she spoke some Occitan to us, the only time...
Garlic as artistic medium
An exhibition of artistic sculptures based on pink garlic – how could I resist when I saw the poster outside the tourist office in Lautrec? Pink garlic is a local speciality, but despite its undoubted charms it didn't seem a promising material for sculpture. I...
Life imitates Debussy
The Ambialet piano course ended last night with concerts by the participants (see some of them in the photo). It never ceases to amaze me how people manage to raise their game in these circumstances, even though most of them find it a nerve-racking experience and...
Choosing to be a musician
An interesting conversation at lunch today about choosing music as a career despite the misgivings of one’s parents. Everyone at the summer school had had some form of The Conversation about whether music was an acceptable profession. Many recalled that they were...
‘Pianistes’
I'm teaching on a lovely summer course for pianists in the south of France. As I write, people are practising in the rooms all around me - everything from Schumann's Fantasy to Beethoven's opus 110, Debussy Preludes and Liszt's Vallée d'Obermann. Put together, we...
Kremer’s conscience
Violinist Gidon Kremer has, I hope, set the cat among the pigeons with his decision to pull out of the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. His letter of explanation is long and somewhat rambling, but perhaps he did not have the time to make it shorter. In any case, his...
A pile of chairs
To the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, where the first thing one sees is ‘Work no 998’ by Martin Creed, four chairs balanced on top of one another in a tapering pile, an orange office chair at the bottom, a child’s formica chair at the top. This is the kind of thing...
Short vs long
An interesting discussion with the NZ Trio who are visiting London this week from their native New Zealand. We were talking about the challenge of performing some of the very long works in the trio repertoire, such as the Schubert trios (40-50 minutes). Many of our...
Looming cameras
To the First Night of the Proms last night, courtesy of some kind friends who had rented a box in the Royal Albert Hall. Benjamin Grosvenor, an excellent young British pianist who has only just turned 19, played Liszt’s second piano concerto with great finesse and...
‘Better sharp than out of tune’
At a Gaudier Ensemble rehearsal last week my colleagues, who come from various European countries, were discussing the unstoppable rise in pitch. Here in England we still tune to A=440 Hz, which has been ‘standard pitch’ since the mid-twentieth-century, though in the...