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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.
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...
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Signing paperbacks
Here I am signing paperbacks in Toppings Bookshop in Edinburgh this morning. Whenever I'm in a big bookstore, especially a well-curated one like Toppings, I look at all the tables with their piles of new books on a thousand fascinating subjects and wonder what chance...
Paperback edition of ‘Women and the Piano’ comes out on May 13
I'm excited about the paperback edition of Women and the Piano coming out this Tuesday. As you probably know, not all hardback books are subsequently released in paperback. It depends on the type of book, on the hardback sales, on the presumed size of the readership....
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...
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...