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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.
Scotsman magazine article about Women and the Piano
Today's Scotsman magazine (20 April 2024) has an article by music critic David Kettle about my book Women and the Piano. As the online version is behind a paywall on the The Scotsman website, I thought I'd quote it here: 'The irony is inescapable. I’m a middle-aged,...
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Signing books at Waterstones
Yesterday I signed a few books at the big Waterstones in Princes Street. For anyone outside the UK, Waterstones is a popular bookstore with branches nationwide and (in this case) a popular coffee shop on the top floor, with great views of Edinburgh Castle. Several...
World Piano Day and a little video
Today is 'World Piano Day' (as if every day wasn't piano day!) and Yale University Press has been tweeting a little clip of me talking about the French pianist-composer Hélène de Montgeroult. De Montgeroult is one of the pianist-composers featured in my new book Women...
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...
Children’s voices
This morning in the village church of Cerne Abbas, we invited the children of the local primary school to come and listen to a rehearsal of Aaron Copland's attractive piece, Appalachian Spring (part of tonight's concert programme). It lasts around 25 minutes, quite a...
Summer music
I'm in rural Dorset to take part in one of those thriving summer music festivals never mentioned in the Guardian's guide to same. This will be the 21st annual festival run by the Gaudier Ensemble; I've been 'at the piano' for eighteen of those years. Despite the...
Blackbirds’ songs
We have a pair of resident blackbirds in our garden, and every day the male blackbird perches on the chimney and sings loudly, especially at dusk. He seems to have several ‘songs’ or sequences of phrases which he sings over and over. I’ve heard them hundreds of times,...
Upgrading to modern sonorities
An interesting discussion with students about whether it’s right to ‘scale things up’ to 21st century tastes when playing 18th/19th century music. They had played Beethoven so powerfully and with such speed and ringing ‘attack’ that I found myself wondering whether...
Riverside nonsense
To Cambridge, where I heard a fine May Week concert at King’s College. (As Clive James pointed out in the title of a book of memoirs, May Week is in June.) It was great to hear that the tradition of excellent music-making continues, even though ‘performance’ is only a...
Voting systems
I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the jury’s deliberations on the Cardiff Singer of the World final on Sunday night. I’d watched most of the other rounds and had realised it was going to be a difficult choice. It was an exceptionally good line-up, and...
Old Sussex surnames
After I had finished my rehearsal in Rye Church in East Sussex the other day, I was standing outside the church waiting for the rain to stop, and my eye fell on the War Memorial commemorating local men who had given their lives in the World Wars of 1914-19 and...
‘A History of Modern Music’
I yield to no-one in my devotion to The Guardian, which I read every day, but I’ve been struck recently by what seems to be a disturbing policy of excluding classical music from discussions of ‘music’. A few weeks ago the paper published a 50-page guide to summer...