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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.
Hallucinations
Historian Tom Holland was guest-editing the 'Today' programme on BBC Radio 4 recently. He spoke about his experience of AI 'hallucinations', that now increasingly well-known phenomenon whereby Artifical Intelligence makes up information in response to a question. Tom...
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My top books of the year 2025
I seem to have read an unusually high number of books this year - surprising, because it was a unusually busy year. Looking back, I realise that long train journeys provided hours of reading time. I often took two books with me on a trip in order not to run out of...
Words stamped into icing
Today I've been icing my home-made Christmas cake. It's taken months to reach this point. I made the cake in October and fed it with malt whisky through holes made in the cake with uncooked sticks of spaghetti. I wrapped the cake in tinfoil and stored it away. Each...
Music at the Coronation
The Coronation of King Charles III came in the same week that we heard the organisation Psappha, which promotes new music, had been forced to close because of funding problems. This in itself followed hard on the heels of threats to close the BBC Singers and reduce...
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...