Steven Osborne - Blog

Ravel, and being on stage

26 February 2012 GMT

I'm in the middle of a really delicious series of recitals comprised entirely of the works of Ravel: the Sonatine, Gaspard de la nuit, La Valse, and a whole bunch of smaller pieces. There are many composers I feel very close to, but maybe none more than Ravel, my first musical love, and a composer who has been with me almost constantly throughout my pianistic career.

A few days ago, just before playing this programme at the Wigmore Hall, I appeared on the Radio 3 programme In Tune, and Sean Rafferty asked me something that really stayed with me: "What does it feel like to sit down on stage before you start a concert?" I thought it was a good question. Every performer must have their own experience of what it means to be on stage, and certainly it can change from concert to concert, but in these Ravel recitals I have had a particularly vivid experience of that moment Sean asked about, the transition from silence to music. The Sonatine, which starts the programme, begins with a kind of sigh, ambiguous with hints of nostalgia, tenderness and longing. The thought of this pure beauty emerging out of the silence gives me a feeling of intense anticipation, like when you're about to see someone you love after an absence. The start of the music feels like a moment of perfection, yet strangely relaxing. It reminds me of when one's eyes shift from a narrow focus to the taking in of one's whole field of vision; it's hard to describe but my whole body changes subtly, perhaps feeling more open, more fluid. Something about the way the music moves gets translated into a bodily feeling of inner movement. There are very few other places I experience such pure pleasure, and I think it probably best to draw a veil over those…. …

NEWS: RAVEL CD NOMINATED FOR BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE AWARD

15 February 2012 GMT

You can vote here. Voting ends 29th February. …

NEW CD: COMPLETE SOLO PIANO WORKS OF RAVEL

08 March 2011 GMT

Details and sound clips here …

Why do you go to concerts?

13 January 2011 GMT

I recently attended a Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert my wife was playing in, and it struck me that my experience of the concert must have been substantially different from most of the audience. Of course, it's natural that I should have been listening especially for Jeannie's dulcet tones on the clarinet, but beyond that, I realised that it was impossible for me to listen simply as an audience member: I found my experience as a performer constantly intruded, causing me not only to analyse the performance in great detail, but also to partially identify myself with the players and conductor as if I was in some subtle way participating in the creation of the music. It made me realise that the pleasure I get from listening to a concert is intimately bound up with the pleasure I get from performing. So that made me very curious about the experience of the (presumably) large majority of non-musicians present in the audience. What were they there for? What did music do for them or to them? I could imagine various possible answers (and no doubt there are many more than I imagined), but the question niggled at me so much that at the end I was compelled to ask the man next to me why he had come to the concert. If he thought I was crazy he graciously didn't show it. And the questions are clearly still niggling me because I'm hoping you'll comment below with your own experiences of concert-going. What do you get out of it? The answer can be as simple or as complex as you like.

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NEWS: CD OF SCHUBERT DUETS WITH PAUL LEWIS RELEASED IN NOVEMBER

20 October 2010 GMT

Hear some excerpts here

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A busy summer

03 October 2010 GMT

Once again I find that work has overtaken my blogging efforts. This summer was a taxing one, with a series of challenging projects. One of the most time-consuming was an innocuous lecture on improvisation I agreed to give at the Edinburgh Festival. It's a subject I feel strongly about, but trying to put my ideas into coherent form was like wrestling eels and took many more days than I expected. Before that, I had played a very unusual Rhapsody in Blue at the Festival conducted by Gunther Schuller, one of the most influential American musicians of the last 100 years (he straddled the classical and jazz worlds, and was at the forefront of experiments to bring them closer together). His ideas about the piece were largely concerned with getting rid of the Hollywood-style glitz and brashness you often hear, and restoring it to the dimensions of a chamber work, elegance replacing volume. It was a real shock for us all at first, but I went as far as I could towards his views, figuring here was a chance to really hear something new, and the result was quite beautiful.

Just before that, in early August, I had a wonderful but busy time in Aspen, playing recital, concerto and chamber music concerts in four days. That is one of the most heavenly places I've ever been to: incredible hiking, great food, and of course a top-notch music festival. Here's the view just 45 minutes walk (mainly up!) from the edge of town.

I've rarely been happier to receive a re-invitation.

Certainly the trickiest part of the summer came at the end, playing Rachmaninov 1st piano concerto at the Proms soon followed by 3 days recording Ravel. The prom was more stressful than usual because I had played the piece a few days previously in Belfast and had a couple of memory lapses which quite badly affected my confidence. After some thought, I decided to use the music in London. In classical music circles, there is a slight disapproval of performers, particularly pianists, using the music (I've heard that some British music colleges stipulate that solo piano exams be played from memory, for example, probably as a reaction to the stigma). Memory is a strange business - when you are relaxed everything flows easily but once you start to doubt it it can feel like turning off a tap (witness the people on TV game shows who say it's so much easier to answer the questions at home). I think there's just no point in adding needless anxiety to a performance, so I have little hesitation in using the music when I feel I need it (normally modern music), but then I'm lucky to already have an established career. How much harder for someone starting out, who maybe struggles with memory, feeling they need to try to 'make a good impression' by playing without music. It's quite cruel when you think about it, particularly when it's over something so irrelevant. Sviatoslav Richter played for years before his death only with the music. I can't think of any good reason for forcing people to play from memory that outweighs the stress it causes. In a state of anxiety one cannot properly access the rest of one's emotions; that in turn inhibits one's ability to communicate through the music.

And so finally to Ravel. In the middle of September I recorded the final installment of my complete survey of his piano music: Gaspard de la Nuit, La Valse, and Miroirs. The experience was both wonderful and terrible, to be honest; all Ravel's music requires so much concentration that by the middle of the second day I was already exhausted. But Andrew Keener, that most sympathetic of recording producers, helped me along with some good psychology and TLC, and in the end I felt excited that I'd managed to capture quite well what I want to say with the music. This is the most stressful part of it, to know you have something of great beauty and intensity to say with the music, but fearing you may not be able to communicate it: maybe because you become too tired, or because there is a problem with the piano, or you can't relax, or a house alarm ruined the best take, or the hall roof keeps creaking, or any number of other things which might interfere. So to finish a recording and feel that you have honoured both the composer and your own feelings about the music is always a cause for great satisfaction.
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Recording Ravel

26 July 2010 GMT

I'm sitting with Jeannie on the plane to Boston, en route to Massachussetts to spend time with her family; her twin nieces were one a couple of days ago so we're catching the tail-end of the birthday celebrations. A long flight like this gives me the first chance in a while to think about writing. It has been a hectic month, the dominant feature of which was three days of recording Ravel solo piano music. Nothing Ravel wrote is easy, even the pieces which sound it; he doesn't seem to know what feels comfortable at the piano. This might well be connected to the fact that he was a pretty mediocre pianist, a fact attested not only by a smattering of recordings (one cannot always rely on early recordings to give an accurate picture), but also contemporary accounts. Yet, perversely, he had an astonishing instinct for the colouristic possibilities of the piano, and while it may not be the most grateful music to learn, it is supremely effective and satisfying to play. Ravel was notoriously defensive in person, capable of being cold and sarcastic even to his good friends, and I think one senses the effect of this defensiveness also in his music. It is not that his music lacks emotion - quite the opposite - but the emotion is often buried under the surface, particularly beneath apparent innocence or playfulness. It is a fascinating solution to the conundrum of how a man who is scared to reveal himself in person can cope with revealing himself through his music, and this conflict produced, in my opinion, some of the most touching and vulnerable music ever written. I've recorded Le Tombeau de Couperin, Sonatine, Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, and a bunch of little pieces; I'll record the remainder of his piano works in September for a double CD of his complete piano music to be released early next year.

Since then I've hardly been at home, but for once it's not work-related: I attended a marvellous 3 day birthday party on the Scottish island of Rum (SCO cellist Su-a Lee hired a whole castle for more than 100 of her friends!), and then visited my great friends the Pigotts in Totnes where I helped make little icing men for a swimming pool birthday cake and played the Lego Harry Potter computer game with the kids. It's nice after the intensity of recording to do something brainless! …

Two Little Slices of Heaven

15 June 2010 GMT

Last night I played the last concert of an exceptionally busy month. It seems that every concert has had different repertoire, including a number of very tricky works in close succession (Brahms 2nd piano concerto, Ravel Gaspard de la nuit and La Valse, Rachmaninov Corelli variations...). I have eagerly awaited this day of freedom, and am presently sitting in London pub with a pint of beer waiting for the football to start. Bliss!

In the midst of all the busyness during the last month, I had a brief but wonderful break from in Achiltibuie to celebrate the birthday of my friend and colleague from Hyperion, Mike Spring (a man who possibly knows as much about piano music as anyone on the planet). Achiltibuie is a very special place, situated in the far northwest of Scotland, 30 minutes along a single track road where one's desire to stare at the fabulous scenery struggles with one's desire not to hit the sheep which keep crossing the road. The village looks out over the Summer Isles and the surrounding area is just idyllic, with some spectacular walking. We stayed at the Summer Isles Hotel, a place renowned for fabulous cuisine; this also happens to be where I started my honeymoon with Jeannie. The only sad part is that Jeannie could only join us on the final evening - she got a call at the last moment to play principal clarinet with the Bergen Philharmonic, which meant she missed the 14 mile walk from Lochinver past Suilven. Jeannie and I did manage to have a quick jaunt up Stac Pollaigh on the morning we left however. This blog post is brought to you by the Stupendous Scotland Tourist Board.

Pebble beach by the road heading up to Achiltibuie

About to get caught in a hail storm up Stac Pollaigh

Hail storm receding

Happily hail-free

North of Suilven looking west

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A mammoth journey

17 April 2010 GMT

I wonder how many classical performers found themselves stranded over the last few days thanks to the Icelandic volcano eruption (my headline of the year goes to the Daily Mail: "AWESOME POWER OF THE FIRES OF HELL. Poison gas, famine, catastrophe. How all the technology in the world can't save us from Mother Earth's fury".) Certainly, it's in the nature of our profession that on any given day there's a good change we're going to be abroad. As for myself, I was in Copenhagen to perform with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Ludovic Morlot (one of the most genial and intensely musical collaborators I've had the pleasure to work with). I was due to fly back on Friday morning for a concert that night in Carlisle with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. By late Thursday night, it was becoming clear that I was going to miss the concert, and I was trying to work out simply how to get home at all. In the end and after much research, I managed to book a berth on a night ferry from the Hook of Holland to Harwich leaving yesterday, which gave me time to make the trek down from Denmark (departing 7.45am on a train bursting at the seams with displaced air passangers, and arriving at the ferry terminal after many changes of train after 8pm). I arrived at 6.30 this morning in Harwich and am now, at 1.40pm on the last little train journey from Edinburgh to Linlithgow. I got off fairly lightly, because there were many at the terminal unable to get on the ferry, with the word being that there were no places available for several days. I knew I had a 2 berth cabin, so was able to take someone with me. The bizarre thing is that when I got to the cabin there were 4 beds in it. I know at least one other person who found the same. Moreover, while I was able to give a spare bed to someone, I know others who were not allowed to, being told the ferry was already full. So it seems like there was a great waste of capacity. There must have been many, like me, travelling alone and forced to book larger cabins because there were no single ones left. The refusal to allow those beds to be filled seems to me inexplicable. …

NEWS: RACHMANINOV PRELUDES CD NOMINATED FOR CRITICS AWARDS AT 2010 CLASSICAL BRIT AWARDS

13 April 2010 GMT

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My altercation with the back doorstep

23 March 2010 GMT

Shortly before Christmas I was woken by the sound of the bin lorry coming down our little cul-de-sac and bolted out of bed to get the bin out in time. Unfortunately it was the first day of the cold snap, and the ground was covered in ice: as a result I went flying when I stepped outside and landed with full weight on left middle finger. At first I didn't think any real damage was done because although it was pretty sore and inflamed it looked otherwise normal. As a precaution I got it X-rayed and was shocked to discover it was actually broken: a tiny flake of bone had been pulled off by one of the ligaments. As breaks go this is relatively minor, but the recuperation time is still significant. 3 months on, it is well on its way to being fully recovered, but I still have slight limitation in movement at the extremes of the range and weakness due to having been unable to use it properly over a long period. I've avoided writing about it until now because I knew I would have to cancel some concerts but wasn't sure how many, and I didn't want to needlessly alarm promoters (the truth is I was also pretty freaked out by the experience and didn't want people asking me about how serious the injury was until I knew if myself). I managed to cancel fewer concerts than I expected but what I had to cancel was really disappointing - a tour of 10 concerts with my wife around Scotland. Some of these were taken over by a couple of other pianists - Aaron Shorr and Scott Mitchell - but thankfully some were moved to this month (we're on our way to Inverness for the penultimate concert as I write). The first concerts I did after the accident were Schubert duets with Paul Lewis at the end of January, and for these I had to refinger everything to avoid the injured digit. Needless to say, this was very irritating! Since then, as luck would have the repertoire has increased in intensity gradually - Beethoven 4th concerto last month, Britten concerto a couple of weeks ago. These I was just about ready to perform when they came up, my finger gradually being able to withstand more stress. By now, the only real limitation I feel is a reluctance to play full power with it. In a month I expect I'll hardly notice there was ever a problem. The only significant obstacle left is my first performance of Rachmaninov's 1st piano concerto next Monday. The problem is not so much a question of power (the other fingers can compensate), as of simply playing the notes: due to the injury I lost several weeks practise time, and what practise I could subsequently do was at first severely restricted to stop my finger swelling up. So I feel like I'm much less prepared than I would normally be for a first performance. I'm pretty frustrated by this, but at the same time I'm grateful I can play the concert at all. And anyway, the whole experience might not be wasted: you have to suffer to play the blues... and Rachmaninov. …

Recording and concerts with Paul Lewis

16 February 2010 GMT

A few posts back I talked about the fun of rehearsing Schubert piano duets with Paul, and we have just completed a run of concerts and a recording of the works (comprising four pieces from the last year of Schubert's life, including the great Fantasie, and two sets of variations)

Piano duet is perhaps the most difficult medium for a pianist to work in. Of course, the first thing is that it is physically awkward, with elbows jostling and fingers getting tangled up, but that's just the start. Only one person can pedal at a time, so someone has to cede control of this crucial tool to their partner who inevitably has different pedalling instincts. Even if they didn't, the instinct is initially to pedal in accordance with one's own part which can ruin the sound of the other part. On the other hand, pedalling in a way which supports a melody you're not yourself playing can be surprisingly tricky. And sometimes pedalling conflicts are impossible to resolve, forcing one to chose between the character of one part or the other.

Then there is the problem of timing. Piano notes have a very percussive start, which means that it is exceptionally hard for two players to make chords sound together - any discrepancy of more than one or two hundredths of a second is audible. This can be a serious headache for music which needs rhythmic flexibility.

Finally one has to create a good balance between the different parts, and this can go strongly against a pianist's instincts. It's the nature of piano playing that one deals in foreground and background, projecting one line above the others; it's rather rare that everything one plays needs to be in the background, even when accompanying another instrument. But in piano duet, it is extremely easy to make the texture very cluttered and to obscure the most important line or lines. As a result to play at the right level sometimes feels as if one is hardly playing at all.

So much for the difficulties. In spite of these, or perhaps even because of them, this has been one of the most enjoyable projects I've ever participated in. The process of rehearsing was great fun as it needs to be for piano duet, I think - otherwise it gets very irritating constantly being told to play quieter! As ever, playing music with friends makes all the difference. The people at the Aldeburgh Festival kindly provided us with a space to rehearse for three days, away from all distractions except for Adnams bitter and one of the best chippies in the country. Our first concert in Norwich already felt very good, and the subsequent concerts got better and better. Finally there was the recording in Potton Hall, taking us full circle back to Suffolk. This was a really inspiring experience, both for what I learned from Paul (everything he does is full of quality) and for the feeling of joint commitment and musical understanding which seemed to unite us. It will be a few months before we get to hear the result of our labours, and probably the end of the year before it's released, but I already feel confident that this is a CD of which I'll be very proud.

As a footnote, Paul has just launched his website. You can find it here: www.paullewispiano.co.uk …

Turangalila and Roulette in Monte Carlo

06 December 2009 GMT

I'm in the middle of a mini-tour of tax havens at the moment. Currently I'm staying with some very dear friends in Vevey, who were my hosts when I played in the Clara Haskil competition almost 20 years ago (I have a couple of concerts with the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra at the beginning of this week). And last week I played Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony with the Monte Carlo Philharmonic and Yakov Kreizberg. This was a rather exceptional experience, and not only because of the monumental feeling that Kreizberg brought to the piece. It was a much-awaited event for the orchestra and audience because he had been ill for a number of months and this was the first concert he was able to undertake as the orchestra's new chief conductor; the combination of these facts and the great performance led to the most crazy, seemingly endless ovation I ever experienced. It is one thing for an audience to love a performance but to see an orchestra respond with such respect and admiration for a conductor was really touching, and it was clear that Kreizberg got the message.

After a post-concert meal, I went to the grand casino to play roulette with Cynthia Millar, who had just performed her 100th Turangalila on that electronic marvel, the Ondes Martenot. Neither of us had ever gambled in our lives before, and strangely enough I had a really good feeling about it in the afternoon. In the event I went in with 40 euros and came out with 210! There are many activities in life where one can be successful the first time because one is not yet aware of the difficulties, and my instinct was to imagine this was the case with my roulette experience. My wife tells me she also was very successful the first time she went to the casino. But of course, roulette is a game of pure chance - there is no skill in picking the right number. I don't think you can even maximise your chances according to what kind of bet you place because the return of a winning bet seems to be strictly related to the amount of risk you take, so I suspect that a monkey would do just as well as the most seasoned roulette player. And if I think back on the day, I remember I had lost my 'lucky feeling' by the evening, and I won anyway. So why should I connect my success to my lucky feeling and not to my lack of it later on? I guess it is more attractive for the ego to imagine one has a subtle influence over these things than to acknowledge one is helpless in the face of pure chance. I think this desire to believe in a control we do not have must be true to an extent because, absurdly, there is a display beside the roulette table showing the previous 15 or so numbers to come up. What possible reason can there be for this except to encourage people to find patterns, to feel that they can give themselves a better chance of winning next time? …

Computer joy

23 November 2009 GMT

The title of this entry is ironic. I'm currently making an arrangement of a few songs from Porgy and Bess to perform with my wife on tour in January, and decided it might be worth investing in some music notation software. I already have a Yamaha electric keyboard which I used for practising in Singapore while Jeannie was still playing with the Singapore Symphony, and the thought of being able to play the music from it directly into the computer with a MIDI connection was very appealing. The first problem - how to hook the keyboard up to the computer? I bought a cable which looked like it should do the job, but no joy. Emails to Yamaha and the software manufacturer; no response. Much searching online for a solution, to no avail. Finally I bought another cable, 10 times the cost of the first, hooked it up to my laptop, but it didn't work. My frustration was starting to rise at a considerable rate. In desperation I tried connecting it to my PC. Still no luck. I fiddled about with every setting I could think of and to my amazement suddenly the connection was there. Funny the way technology can make one feel helpless! It turns out the instructions in the Yamaha keyboard manual were wrong.

Having the ability to play music directly into the computer is only the start of the process, however. I still have to learn how to edit what appears on the screen and this is a bewildering process. I printed out the list of keyboard commands to study - all 18 pages of them! I spent yesterday morning experimenting with them and inflicting all kinds of indignities on the British national anthem in the process. Gradually, I'm getting to grips with the logic of the system, and I have the sense that computer joy may in fact not be so far away after all. …

London and Dallas

31 October 2009 GMT

This has been a wonderful month for collaborations. After Hannu Lintu's Beethoven, I had the pleasure to work again with Alban Gerhardt. Playing with him is like putting on a pair of comfortable slippers - it feels completely easy and natural. It's a measure of the trust I have in him that when his D string broke 2 minutes into our Wigmore Hall lunchtime concert (live radio!), I had no concern that it would be difficult for him to get back into the flow of things, and so it turned out. Poor guy, though - I'd asked for the dressing room to be locked because I had all my stuff for this long trip there, so he couldn't get in at first. He came running back on stage to enter the dressing room the back way and that was locked too! So in all there was probably 2 or 3 minutes of dead air for the presenter to fill. The irony is, he was playing on a broken bow that he'd had to superglue that morning, and had a 2nd bow on stage with him in case it broke again.

I had to leave pretty much immediately after the concert to get a flight to New York, en route to Dallas for Rachmaninov 2 with Stéphane Deneve, and I had the greatest travel luck of my life. Since there was no longer a direct flight to Dallas by the time I was leaving London, I had to stay overnight in New York and also change airport. So I landed at 9.35pm in JFK, got straight through immigration where there was no queue, hopped in a taxi (I only have hand luggage with me) and was at my hotel in LaGuardia by 10.10! Then on the flight the next morning, I had a row to myself so I lay down for 3 hours to help kick the jetlag. I can't tell you how happy I was; such bits of luck in the middle of a gruelling schedule are godsends.

I'm in the middle of things in Dallas now. We've played 2 out of 4 concerts so far, the first a little sketchy but the 2nd great. It's so nice having friends like Stéphane and his wife Åsa to spend time with; their 20 month old daughter Alma has been hilarious too. We went to an obscenely good steak restaurant yesterday. 2 more concerts and then I'm back home, which I have to say I'm very much looking forward to; it feels like a long time since I've been able to spend proper time with my wife. …

On the road

24 October 2009 GMT

I've hardly been at home this month, what with a very fun tour with the Orchestre des Pays de Savoie and now a trip of 11 days taking in Finland, London and Dallas. Before leaving on Tuesday I had two days at home to catch up with Jeannie and we made the best of what time we had, going to see the fabulous new Pixar film, Up, and eating her delicious cooking. Really, she could open a restaurant if she had the inclination.

Now I'm on my way to London after playing Beethoven 4 for the first time since I was a student. It's quite an amazing piece to work on, so rich in musical substance and metaphor. What is the exact nature of the relationship between piano and orchestra in the 2nd movement, and indeed at the beginning of the whole piece? I am sure that the subtleties and complexities of the piece are impossible to exhaust, no matter how much one thinks about it. My partners were Hannu Lintu and the Tampere Philharmonic, and it was a great collaboration. Hannu is one of my favourite conductors for Beethoven - he has gentleness, wildness, and a wonderfully instinctive grasp of structure. To make music with someone like this is inspiring and it really helped me in the concert, where I didn't feel entirely comfortable (it's challenging to play a piece of this magnitude after a long break); seeing his complete immersion in the music and open smiles kept drawing me back to what a privilege it is to play music like this.

Finland is only 2 hours ahead of the UK but somehow my body clock was quite disturbed. I woke up at 5am yesterday morning (3am UK time!) and couldn't sleep again. So I watched on my laptop the infamous edition of Question Time I wrote about in my last post, as well as news reports of the event. It was rather surreal to me to see a screaming mob outside BBC Broadcasting House where the episode was being filmed, with a kind of vicious energy normally reserved for paedophiles and the like. Given that NIck Griffin was democratically elected, I guess these people must object to democracy in some way. I had an interesting talk about it to Maritta HIrvonen, who works with the Tampere Philharmonic. She said there is a party similar to the BNP in Finland which has some modest electoral success, but creates little controversy. The mainstream politicians don't seem to think that it's a terrible thing for them to have some representation in parliament; after all, their power is very small, and being represented gives them a chance to air their views, hear opposing views, and keeps them from becoming too marginalised and paranoid.

Ironically the BNP is being demonised by protestors in the same way the BNP demonises Muslims - there is no attempt to understand the position that the 'other' is taking. It reminds me of objections to the 'humanisation' of Hitler in the film Downfall. I find this mystifying. To portray Hitler as human is simply to state the obvious, and to attempt to paint him as a monster with no possible redeeming feature is not only unrealistic, it also limits our ability to understand the past. The crucial and terrible issue is - how could a man become so detached from his own humanity that he could commit such acts? So with the BNP: why is it that a somewhat significant proportion of the British electorate are willing to vote for a party that wants anyone who isn't white to leave the country? It is of course tempting to demonise people with views like this but where does it get you? You become unable to discuss with them, and find out the real source of their anxiety. Is it about jobs, or housing, or fear of people who are different, or what? That the main parties remain unable to address this became clear watching Question Time. Most of the programme was taken up challenging Nick Griffin with his past quotes in an atmosphere akin to bear-baiting, but when someone asked, "Have the Labour government's policies on immigration contributed to the rise of the BNP?", the mood became much more uncertain. The government minister said no then flannelled, the opposition spokesman said yes then unconvincingly tried to show how the Conservative policy would be better, but what no-one did was actually address the rise of the BNP. Why are ordinary people voting for them? It was the elephant in the room.

Strangely, this issue is very close to my experience of music-making. I've always had very strong musical convictions and years ago when I played chamber music I would fight for my ideas to dominate the group interpretation. I rarely liked the ideas other people presented, and somehow couldn't imagine that their instincts could be as valid as my own. More recently, I've come to realise that if I open up to someone else's ideas then I often come away with a fuller understanding of the possibilities of the music. Often, it subtly changes my own musical instincts. Above all, it's a much more interesting and engaging experience. So I've learned that examining ideas I maybe don't initially like can be very enlightening. I suspect if our politicians honestly explored the reasons why people vote BNP, they would find themselves in a much better position to counter the rhetoric and re-engage with the electorate.

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Peter Hain and the BNP

21 October 2009 GMT

Whenever I hear political debates, I normally end up being very glad I'm not a politician. It's not only the childish way such debates are often conducted, but also something more fundamental - I rarely have strong instincts for what should be done to solve any given problem, because I often can't make my mind up about the value of different proposals. So my gut response to politicians is much more on the level of personality than policy and in this I have one overriding conviction, that politicians should be honest. Needless to say, this ends up being rather frustrating.

The latest irritation for me was Peter Hain's letter to the BBC asking them not to allow the British National Party's leader, Nick Griffin, to appear on the debate show Question Time. For any who don't know, the BNP is a far right group proposing, among other things, repatriation of non-white foreigners (whether voluntary or forced is not entirely clear). Personally, I think the attempt to deny any publicity to such groups is completely counter-productive: people will still have these beliefs regardless of whether or not they are publicly expressed and I'd have thought it would be much more sensible to engage them in debate than try to silence them: that simply entrenches them in their views and allows them to take on the role of martyr. However, what really irritated me about Peter Hain's letter was his assertion that the BNP should be barred from the programme not because their views were repugnant (an argument which the government has been pressing to the BBC for weeks) but because their party constitution was found in court to be illegal due to a bar on non-whites membership. In Hain's opinion that makes them an 'unlawful party' and so ineligible to appear on Question Time. Given that the BNP has agreed to amend its constitution, I find Hain's stance very objectionable because I doubt he really believes in his own argument: if he did, then surely he would be pressing for the existing BNP councillors and two MEPs to be immediately be stripped of their responsibilities. Instead, it looks like an attempt on his part to use dubious legal grounds to silence the BNP. In so doing he makes himself appear foolish as well as giving perfect propaganda for the BNP - 'Look how afraid the government are of us."

On the same day I heard Peter Hain's comments I also heard a radio interview with Nick Griffin and he did something rather shocking: he answered all the questions directly. I don't remember the last time I heard that from a politician and I think there's an important lesson here. Politicians often talk about the need to reconnect with voters but invariably mess it up because they simply can't talk directly to the public. They appeared terrified of saying anything which might be misconstrued or used against them in the future. Those unafraid of giving forthright or controversial opinions, as Tony Benn was, are extremely few. The reasons for this are probably complex, but certainly involve the depressing habit of the print and broadcast media to exaggerate any minor controversy to the point of absurdity; in this climate, one can have sympathy for politicians wary of damaging not only their own reputation but also that of their party. Nevertheless, this timidity leaves a gaping hole in the political landscape that politicians like Nick Griffin could easily take advantage of, particularly on a highly-charged issue like immigration. Simply put, it is part of human nature to be selfish, and views like "Britain is for the British" will always be around. To deny this, as the main parties appear to do, leaves the BNP and their ilk to attract people who think, "No-one else is acknowledging how I feel about all these foreigners". Furthermore, there is something attractive about honesty, even if one disagrees with the opinions being expressed, and I suspect this is part of the reason that mainstream politicians are afraid of the BNP gaining in public exposure: they fear the BNP's ability not only to articulate the baser aspects of public opinion, but to attract those disillusioned by the constant double-speak coming from government and opposition alike. If mainstream parties don't have the courage to learn to speak plainly to us about difficult issues, then I think they are by default promoting the BNP's kind of divisive rhetoric which can only be damaging to our society. …

NEWS: Britten concerto CD wins Gramophone Award for best concerto recording

03 October 2009 GMT

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Three chamber music collaborations

01 October 2009 GMT

I've been to Berlin's Schoenefeld airport and back twice in the last three weeks for chamber music collaborations, the first with Nicola Benedetti in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern festival, the second with Alban Gerhardt and Viviane Hagner in the Berliner Festspeile. Then, at the weekend, I went down to London to rehearse some Schubert piano duets with Paul Lewis. Increasingly, I'm finding there is nothing to beat chamber music: concertos and solo recitals are wonderful and deeply satisfying in their own way, but making music in a small group of equals is more complex and subtle. A lot of it is down to personal chemistry: musical instincts come very strongly out of a person's character and I generally find that when I get on well with someone I also like their approach to music. So it is with all of these musicians I worked with recently.

I first played with Nicola last year and it was a great experience. To me, the to and fro of rehearsing as you try and work out a shared view of the music is as important as the concerts, and with Nicola this is a very stimulating process: she's flexible but also brings strong ideas of her own. For our concert in Germany we had a serious, challenging programme of Debussy, Prokofiev and Brahms, and we both wished we'd had more time to rehearse, but in the end the performance was pretty satisfying. She has the instincts both of a soloist and a chamber musician (she can 'take control' of the music and also respond very quickly when someone else does it), and that's a very nice combination to work with. After the concert there was something rather magical - a walk up a wide candle-lit path from the Schloss where we'd played to a schnapps distillery, where we had a wonderful meal and some of the best liqueurs I've ever tasted. Schloss Zinzow, if you're interested!

Alban I've played with many times and it just gets better and better. At the root of it, I think, is a real sense of trust that has built up over the years, which comes from a shared sense of musical and personal values, a similar joy in performing, and simply having a lot of fun together. Viviane was very easy to work with too, and did a wonderful job with the teacherous violin part in the Schubert Bb trio. After the concert Alban and I went to see Berlin's main football team, Hertha, get beaten 0-4, their 6th loss in a row. I'm not sure if Alban's more passionate about music or football, to be honest: I'm surprised he had a voice left at the end.

Finally, a day's rehearsing with Paul. We're preparing all the duet works from the last year of Schubert's life as well as a couple of sets of variations for concerts at the start of next year and then a recording on Hyperion. Neither of us had been able to prepare the music completely so we had a few Laurel and Hardy moments, but it was quite important to have this time in advance of the concerts - Schuberts duets often have the players' hands getting rather tangled up, so at times you have to slightly redistribute the notes. It's better finding out about these problems more than two days before the concerts! The great thing about chamber music is what you learn from your partners, and with Paul I'm fascinated by a captivating stillness which he can create instantaneously, a sense of complete identification with the music. Actually, I feel that a sense of stillness is one of the strengths of my own playing but the flavour of it with Paul is different somehow. I think Schubert is central to his musical identity and it's exciting to be working on these pieces with him. …

NEWS: Rachmaninov Preludes CD awarded a Deutscher Schallplattenpreis

22 September 2009 GMT

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Ravel in Manchester - more on performance anxiety

03 September 2009 GMT

I rarely get nervous for concerts but one exception was a recent performance of Ravel's 'Gaspard de la nuit' and 'La Valse' at the Chetham's piano summer school. I'd played the works for the first time two days previously and had not been very happy with how they had gone. Now I had to face the fear of embarrassing myself in front of people like Bernard Roberts and Peter Donohoe, not to mention a whole room full of piano students. It was made worse by the fact that I'd not been able to practise at full strength for a while - I'd been plagued by minor muscle strains for weeks - and so I didn't feel completely prepared. The unpleasant novelty of being nervous about a concert gave me a lot to think about, and made me realise how unhelpful nerves can be: I started to imagine disastrous mishaps, and lost the unquestioning trust I normally have in my abilities. Nevertheless, when I finally came to perform I felt once again as I normally do - relaxed and excited to be on stage. So what changed in the interim? I'll come to that in a moment.

A common view among musicians is that nerves are inevitable and even useful up to a point. But why should they be inevitable? If you can play something well in your practice room, why not on stage? My experience is that the more relaxed I am on stage, the better I play, and I can honestly say that before most concerts I have no nerves at all, only excitement. This issue comes into sharp relief when we think about the very widespread fear of public speaking; in some surveys it comes out as the number one fear, ahead even of death. That tells us something very important about how irrational we can be when it comes to being isolated in front of a group. What possible harm can come to us? If we speak easily to individuals every day, why should we suddenly become tongue-tied giving a speech? Clearly, a speech needs structure and concision - there is a certain skill involved there. But that doesn't explain why the thought of it should induce panic. Somehow, we perceive a level of threat which is completely illusory, and our audience can seem to become a pack of wild animals waiting to devour us. This is a fascinating question to ponder - what is going on in our brains? Surely some kind of ancient memories are being evoked, whether from early childhood or from our evolutionary past. If anyone can suggest further reading on this, I'd be very interested. The important point is to realise that our rational thinking gets hijacked by our 'fight or flight' response, and that our perception of risk becomes seriously warped.

I think this is a helpful context for thinking about musical performance. If it is common to panic at the thought of simply talking to a group, it should not come as a surprise that something as physically complex as playing a musical instrument could create at least as much fear. Anecdotally, I know of several very eminent musicians who suffer greatly from performance anxiety, and my suspicion is that there are virtually no performers who do not struggle with it from time to time. While one can certainly talk about various rational fears - playing wrong notes, not conveying the feeling of a piece, disappointing oneself/one's teacher/one's friends, damaging one's career and so on - I think the reality is that often these fears get confused with the much stronger, 'fight or flight' kind of fear. Certainly, that was my experience before the concert in Manchester. I thought I was worried about appearing rather foolish to people I respected, but I came to realise it was a much more visceral feeling than that, a feeling of profound threat. Once I understood that, it became easier to deal with. I don't think this kind of irrational fear can be reasoned with; I had tried telling myself that I could play these pieces pretty well but that made no difference to my anxiety. What helped me was examining the fear as calmly as I could, noting its irrationality, and placing it alongside what I knew to be the truth of the situation - that the fear didn't reflect reality, that the audience were not 'wild animals', and that I was capable of performing well. This is a process which needs patience and curiosity, but in holding these contradictory positions together in my mind I found the fear gradually dissipating and, in the end, disappearing altogether. I regained that sense of trust in my abilities and in the audience's receptiveness, and the concert ended up being deeply satisfying, an outcome almost unimaginable to me 24 hours before. I found the whole experience a salutory lesson in how much more control we have over our minds than we sometimes think, and how needless nerves can be.

There's one other thing which I think is worth mentioning - a Buddhist meditation practice called the 'Metta Bhavana' (the links on the left of the page take you through it) which explores our feelings towards ourselves and others. I'm not Buddhist but I think this practice is a very useful antidote to performance anxiety because it emphasises our common humanity and strikes at the illusion that the performer is different from the audience. That means you have to give up a sense of specialness as a performer, but it also means you no longer see the audience as a hostile mob. In the end, I think both changes are extremely helpful. …

Gaspard de la nuit - believe the hype

01 September 2009 GMT

It's a while since I've written because I've been completely taken up with preparing Ravel's 'Gaspard de la nuit' and 'La Valse', which I finally performed last week after many months of work. Gaspard is one of those works which is sometimes referred to as 'the hardest piece ever written' in piano folklore. Other favoured contendors for the title are Rachmaninov's 3rd piano concerto and Balakirev's Islamey. Then we move into the super-virtuosity of Alkan and the brain-twisting complexities of Sorabji's 'Opus Clavicembalisticum'. Of course, there can be no decisive winner in this contest - every pianist has different strengths and weaknesses. A friend from school, David Horne, could play repeated octaves faster than the devil himself and could rattle off Islamey without much trouble; learning that would probably land me in the sanitorium. But I remember him asking me how I made a particular sound on the piano and no amount of demonstrating could help him grasp it. When I initially looked at Gaspard, I thought it would suit me quite well - it is very much focussed on effects of sonority - and while I certainly found it taxing to learn, it was only two weeks before the performances that I started to appreciate quite what a challenge it is.

Learning a new piece is an unpredictable process - sometimes the work proceeds very quickly at the beginning then more slowly later. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes it's all slow or all quick. But in my experience there's always a final 'hump' to get over, when I can just about play the piece at speed but it feels a bit awkward and uncomfortable. Normally this only takes a few days at most to overcome but with Gaspard it took weeks (and even now I'm not quite 'over the hump'). Scarbo, the 3rd movement, has the most fearsome reputation, and indeed it goes by so quickly with so few regular patterns that it is as much a challenge for the concentration as the fingers. But to me even worse is the first movement, Ondine, which is essentially a very simple piece: a long, hypnotic melody with shimmering accompaniment. Ravel's depiction of the water nymph trying to seduce a mortal man is an astounding achievement, both in its musical effect and its imaginitive exploration of piano technique. Unfortunately for the performer, technical feats which would be rather tricky at a moderate volume here become appallingly difficult because they have to be played almost inaudibly but absolutely evenly. I think this might be the cruelest piece I've ever played because the amazing atmosphere Ravel creates can be broken in a moment if there is a brief lapse of control; it's as if someone gives you a priceless Ming vase then tells you to carry it across black ice wearing slippery shoes. The strange thing is, Ravel was a mediocre pianist at best (there are a couple of recordings of him playing), and I struggle to understand how a composer of such limited pianistic ability was able to create a work which explores the possibilities of the piano in such a prodigiously creative fashion.

So, how were the performances? Well, frankly I felt a bit daunted in the first concert, aware of the scale of the challenge, and I wasn't satisfied with the results. That made me very nervous thinking about the second concert which was at a piano summer school at Chetham's school, Manchester - so many pianists listening! More on that in the next entry, because there's a lot to say about it. But, suffice it to say, after this second performance I was starting to feel like this could be an enormously satisfying piece to perform. …

NEWS: Rachmaninov preludes and Britten concerto discs nominated for Gramophone Awards

13 August 2009 GMT

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Spannugen festival

04 August 2009 GMT

Well, I'm rather late talking about this - almost a whole month late (I've been too preoccupied learning Ravel Gaspard and La Valse) - but I have to make some comments on this fantastic chamber music festival in the German village of Heimbach, run by Lars Vogt. I've been twice before, and every time it makes a great impression on me, both for the quality of music-making and the sheer fun of it. Lars is a very special guy and musician, and he tries to invite musicians who he feels are more interested in the music than their ego; he obviously has a good nose for it because the intensity of music-making is something I have very rarely experienced elsewhere. There is a concert every night for a week, and it's actually a slightly surreal experience because there are so many stupendous performances that you come to expect such quality as a matter of course. All the musicians and their family/friends eat together after the concerts and there is really a great atmosphere if you don't mind the frequent danger of being hit by sodden paper napkin projectiles. This all makes me reflect on two things. The quality of chamber music sky-rockets when you can have a laugh with your colleagues; and generally the most profound musicians I know are also the silliest. I can't recommend the festival highly enough if you fancy a summer music getaway. Unless you eat with the musicians, you have nothing to fear from wet napkins.... The website is www.spannugen.de …

Stravinsky in Aldeburgh

18 June 2009 GMT

I played for the first time Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments last week in Aldeburgh. I have difficulty getting on with some of Stravinsky's neoclassical works - to me they can be so abstract and 'unemotional' that I can't find a way in - but this concerto I'm coming to love. It's witty, touching, exuberant, and marvellously structured. There are also veiled military references (the work was written in 1920), which provide a fascinating counterbalance to the generally upbeat character. I had the good fortune to be performing with the LPO and Vladimir Jurowski, particularly given the challenge of performing a work of such precision in the sumptuously resonant acoustic of the Snape Maltings.

I find the first performance of a concerto a challenging task because there's no way to anticipate certain imponderables in the practise room. How easy is it to hear important orchestral detail on stage? How loud do I have to be to balance the orchestra? What are the important things to discuss with the conductor? Where is the orchestra likely to be dragging (almost never the opposite!)? And, simply, what does it feel like to play the work with the orchestra present? Also, a first performance of anything is invariably little more than a sketch of what one will in time bring to a work, because it takes many performances to find one's way into the emotional depths of a piece. To take an extreme example, the first time I played Messiaen's Vingt Regards (at two and a quarter hours length), it felt like a massive test of endurance. But over the years, the work has felt shorter and shorter in concert as I become more used to the scale of it, and now starting to perform the work feels a bit like settling into a comfy sofa. Strange analogy, maybe, but not far from the truth. So, returning to the Stravinsky, Jurowski was particularly helpful for this 'first performance': he conducted with complete assurance (it's a complex score), and brought strong ideas of his own which fleshed out a couple of areas where my own ideas were not fully formed. I keep getting the idea that the conductor acts a bit like a midwife in this kind of situation, but that means I'm comparing the challenge of a first performance with getting a baby out of one's belly, and that seems to slightly overstate the case.... …

New Zealand and Malaysia

17 June 2009 GMT

Well, it's a while since I've written anything despite a pretty eventful few weeks. The reason is that I generally feel like I should have something of at least moderate interest to say - simply writing, "I went here, I played lovely concerts with this orchestra and conductor, I had beans for breakfast" etc. seems pretty pointless. Nevertheless, it has got to the point where I feel I should say hi, so to speak.

A couple of weeks ago I came back from a month's trip to New Zealand and Malaysia. I was quite stunned by the beauty of the former; I think it's the only place I've ever visited where I thought to myself, "I could really imagine living here". Of course that idea didn't survive more than a couple of seconds once I considered where I play most of my concerts, but I felt very much at home in the midst of this marvellous scenery and rather relaxed pace of life. I hear that people in Wellington complain they have a long commute to work if the drive takes 15 minutes! I was touring the north island with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Matthias Bamert, a really enjoyable collaboration for us all, I think. Then on to Kuala Lumpur to play Mozart with the Malaysian Philharmonic and Claus Peter Flor. I spent a lot of time looking at the Petronas Towers out of my hotel window. I just can't quite get it into my head that humans are capable of building something like this. If I think about it, actually, I'm amazed by most feats of engineering, despite my dad having been a civil engineer. Simply building a house seems to me an astounding technical achievement. I guess, like playing an instrument, it's just the convergence of a very large number of distinct skills, most of which I could readily understand if I took the time to explore, but for the Towers I can't quite shake a sense of amazement, as if it's akin to magic. How did we ever achieve this mastery over the world? …

Swine flu, the news, risk-assessment and performance anxiety

01 May 2009 GMT

Is the feeling that the world is going slowly mad a sign of middle-age? If so, I'd better buy my slippers and pipe. I've just listened to a full 15 minutes of a 30 minute BBC news bulletin devoted to the terrifying threat (sic) that swine flu poses to the world. We had the worse case scenario explored in intimate detail with only a fleeting acknowledgement that this probably won't occur. Never mind that only one person outside of Mexico has died from the disease, or that the Mexican government recently downgraded the number of deaths conclusively linked to swine flu from 20 to 7, or that many thousands of people already die every year from flu and its complications. People with the virus seem to be recovering quickly? Well, one of the programme's guests warned us that the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 appeared relatively benign when it first appeared, only to end up killing tens of millions. In other words, everybody panic! In a rare missed trick, the newscasters neglected to warn us that a large asteroid hitting the planet would probably wipe out life as we know it. Increasingly the news seems to be an elaborate theatre in which distorted snippets of current events are used to terrify the wits out of us. The sad thing is, it must be what we want or else the news providers wouldn't find it a profitable angle to pursue.

A few months after 9/11, I remember seeing Dr Phil on American TV being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. (For those who don't know Dr Phil, he's a US talk show host who prides himself on his reason and empathic skills. Is it possible anyone doesn't know Oprah?) He said that given the terrorist danger the country faced at that time, he judged it was too risky to take his son to a football game. Oprah nodded sagely. And yet presumably, neither found it too risky to step into their car, despite 42,000 people being killed in car accidents in the US in 2001. I was amazed and disturbed that two of the most trusted personalities in America were publicly advocating such a paranoid response to terrorism.

Why do people take such irrational stances towards risk? On the one hand it's understandable - an unfamiliar risk is scarier than a familiar one because you don't know its extent, but that shouldn't stop adults being able to reflect on the risk and put it in a sensible perspective. Maybe the problem is that people who live in societies of greatly reduced risks (from death in childbirth, food shortage, waterborne disease etc.) can lose their tolerance to it. We imagine in fact that we are in control of our lives, immune from disaster, and so every little threat that emerges is intolerable. We are clearly not helped in this by a news system intent on fostering that paranoia in us. I went to see my financial adviser yesterday who surprised me by saying that the stock market had risen by about 25% in the last month. I listen to the news on the radio regularly as well as reading a couple of newspapers online, yet I didn't notice about this. After months of disastrous economic headlines it seems pretty dishonest that this information didn't make it into the news in any significant way.

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Yesterday I held a seminar on performance anxiety at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dance in Glasgow. Here again, the question of risk arises, and it's a thorny one. It is common for people to be nervous of performing, often very nervous. (I asked at the beginning if anyone didn't experience nerves - not one hand went up.) But what actually is the nature of the risk? What is the problem with playing badly? If you think about jobs with real pressure - deciding whether or not to go to war, performing brain surgery, being a firefighter - it is clear that nothing terrible can happen to a performer. Only our ego can be damaged, and what's so very bad about that? There is often a large disparity between the reality of the 'threat' and a performer's experience of it - the audience can be imagined as a very hostile, critical group when by and large they are simply there to enjoy themselves. Coming to grips with this disparity is a crucial part of developing as a performing musician.

Clearly there can be practical consequences to playing badly - in a competition, it can mean not advancing to the next round, in concert it can mean bad reviews, over a long period of time it can damage a career or prevent it from happening in the first place. And here there is a cruel irony - almost invariably the more relaxed you are about the quality of a performance, the better you play, but the more determined you are to play well, the more tense you get. So how do you foster that sense of relaxation, of 'not caring'? In the course of the discussion yesterday, a point came up which relates to the risk-phobia of our culture. No-one can create a career in music for themselves - there is so much luck involved. I suspect the terror of playing badly is often related to a fantasy that you are in control of your destiny, that your success or failure depends entirely on you: that way you don't have to accept the fact that many forces are outside of your control. The realisation that life can be unpredictable and unfair is a double-edged sword, both painful and freeing, and it can help a performer to forget about reaching for success and simply play for no other reason than the joy of experiencing and sharing music with others. In my opinion, this is when real music-making happens. …

Earplugs

06 April 2009 GMT

I have had a few confused enquiries in recent months about what I wear in my ears when I perform. The answer: earplugs. This probably seems a bit absurd - why would I want to block out the sound I'm creating? Well, there are many reasons. It originally started when I developed mild tinnitus after practising for several years on a piano which was too large for my practice room. Of course, this was a rather disturbing experience, and I rushed off to an audiologist who found minor hearing loss in one of my ears and recommended I wear custom-made earplugs whenever I practise. So I bought some Etymotic musicians earplugs which reduce the sound by about 15Db (which means you still hear everything, just a bit quieter), and was rather surprised to discover that practising with them lent three significant advantages. Firstly, the sound coming back at you is much less overwhelming. This is important because a grand piano can create an enormous amount of noise in a small room and, much in the way that someone shouting in your ear causes you to recoil, this can create a lot of tension in your body. I wasn't even aware of this until I started using earplugs, when I discovered that my body was quickly relaxing due to the reduced volume. Secondly, you play as if you are in a much bigger room - it is a very common difficulty with students to convince them to play loudly enough to project in a big hall because it feels very unnatural. Something written mp may well have to be played mf or even f to convey the effect. Earplugs instantly transport you into a larger aural space, so to speak.The third advantage was maybe more personal - I found that I became more detached from the music that I was working on. This might sound like a disadvantage, but for me it is easy to be seduced by the sensual nature of sound, to get carried away by the music and waste time simply playing through pieces rather than focussing clearly on what work needs to be done. So my practice became much more efficient as a direct result of wearing earplugs.

I told my good friend Alban Gerhardt about this who, being the open-minded soul that he is, immediately tried out some earplugs and loved the experience. Very soon he was telling me he was enjoying using them for concerts too. I had done this once before and found the experience very disconcerting, but on his recommendation I tried again. At first I felt very insecure because wearing earplugs meant I got no feedback from the acoustic - was I too loud or too quiet? But after a couple of concerts I realised that it was actually just as easy to judge how loud to play with or without earplugs from simply observing the size of the hall and trying the piano for a few seconds au naturel (do not misunderstand what I mean here). It is possible to misjudge this, of course, but then it's possible without earplugs as well.

So what are the advantages of performing with earplugs? Essentially, it is a question of focus - I find with earplugs I am less distracted by audience noise and problems with the piano. The first never bothered me much anyway, but the second can be very irritating - when certain notes are a bit louder or softer than the others, it can really disturb one's concentration. Some pianists would probably say that this is a terrible reason to wear earplugs, like burying your head in the sand, but my belief is that these piano quirks seem much more significant to the performer than the audience, and that by wearing earplugs I actually hear much more realistically what the audience hears. But this is incidental: the real point is that performing for me is about achieving a state of unselfconsciousness in which I can react very spontaneously to the emotion of the music. For this, earplugs are very helpful.

As it happens, musicians wearing earplugs is becoming something of an issue for european orchestras. The EU is investigating how much noise orchestral musicians are subjected to with the possibility that earplugs will be compulsory in some settings. I think this would be a great shame - the experience of playing wind instruments, for example, can be fundamentally altered by earplugs (even the intonation can sound different), so coercion seems an unfortunate way of solving the problem. Nevertheless, one can easily damage one's hearing without realising, and it certainly must be a good thing for orchestral musicians to understand exactly what is going into their ears. Jeannie told me that one time when she was sitting directly in front of a trumpeter, it felt like someone was slapping her in the back of the head.

One thing I feel rather strongly about is that music colleges should give out earplugs as a matter of course. I suspect some students would find their work improves if they use them because many practise rooms in British music colleges, and probably elsewhere, are too small for the purpose; you simply can't hear properly what's going on when you play loudly. …

St. George's Hall, Liverpool

30 March 2009 GMT

This is just a brief entry to comment on what a fabulous hall this is. Renovated for the European Capital of Culture last year, it is now without doubt one of the finest recital halls in the country. I played a recital there two weeks ago and was immediately smitten. …

A mammoth trip

30 March 2009 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I got back home for the first time in 5 weeks, to be greeted, of course, by a mound of post as well as all the emails I hadn't got around to dealing with while I was away. I'm only now through this backlog and able to give you an update on what has been happening.

After Iceland I went on to play at the opening of the Melbourne Recital Hall which turns out to be a wonderful place: beautifully designed, excellent acoustics, and 2 great pianos. Piers Lane chose them, and as I was talking to him about it I remembered the one time I chose a piano for a hall - the Horsecross in Perth. That is really a tough job because pianos sound completely different in a small-ish factory room compared to a hall. I learned this to my cost the first time I had to choose a piano for a recording - I went to Steinways and picked out a wonderful, colourful, ballsy instrument which in the recording venue turned out to be much less powerful than I expected. So three days of very hard work followed.

It was a strange experience to play in Melbourne during the recent fires; it was clear people were preoccupied and it makes you question the value of what you are doing. On September 11th 2001 I was due to give a house concert for some friends in London and after seeing these incredibly surreal images on television of planes flying into skyscrapers I really had to ask myself if it was possible to play, and for people to listen. In the end, we decided to continue with the concert and I think it a decision which everyone thought in retrospect was the right one: it turned out to be a very joyful shared experience, in spite of, or maybe even because of the context.

There followed a week in Japan with the NHK symphony, a wonderfully disciplined orchestra. Japan is one of the few places in the world left where you really struggle to get by without speaking their language. That doesn't particularly bother me - I actually quite enjoy the challenge of making myself understood - but I had a salutory experience going to a restaurant without menu where you just order from all the ingredients laid out in front of you. The food was rather good, and before the bill came the waiter showed me their photo album of previous diners - Sting, Britney Spears, Daniel Craig, Christina Aguilera, Brad Pitt etc. etc. I got a bit worried at this point. The bill ended up being just over £100. Still, I heard about someone who went to a hostess bar in the same area, had a few drinks with one of the hostesses, and ended up with a bill for £1000, so maybe I got off lightly.

The final concert of the trip was in Singapore, an old friend of an orchestra which a few years ago happily (for me!) gave up its associate principal clarinet to be my wife. I met up with Jeannie there because she had a concert herself, and then we went on to have a brief holiday in Cambodia and Thailand. I have to say that Cambodia is one of the most extraordinary places I've ever been to. Most famous is the 12th century temple of Angkor Wat which is astonishing, utterly ancient and even alien (and strangely reminiscent of Gaudi, I thought). Hardly less impressive are many other temples scattered around the Siem Reap area. It is impossible to be unaware of the great poverty there and on a trip to the 'floating village' (exactly what it sounds like), we were taken to a shop where you can buy items for the local school at outrageous prices, even by western standards. You then get taken to the school where you hand the items out to the children. I found this a very morally dubious enterprise: the shopkeeper is cheating the children out of the extra supplies they would receive if a fair price was charged, and us tourists are made to feel like heroes handing out measly packets of nuts or pencils to the kids when the main thing we're doing is interrupting their education. Still, it was actually a very valuable experience - to give something directly to people who have so little makes it much harder to ignore the fact that they are the same as you. It is very difficult to take in the reality of economic inequalities around the world, I think, and that experience forced me think about these things in a new way. …

Iceland

07 February 2009 GMT

I just got back to the UK from Iceland, where I was playing Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and Rumon Gamba. This trip really brought me to a state of high excitement, more so than any country I've visited for years. It's hard to say exactly why, but it has something to do with barren places - I find them very fascinating and somehow nourishing. To be in the middle of a wilderness with very little to look at is one of my very favourite places to be. I think it must be partly that the lack of visual stimulation is a very calming thing; maybe also that one's significance (or lack thereof) comes into sharper focus when confronted with such a landscape. Why is feeling insignificant desirable? To me it cuts to the core of what it is to be human - to learn the truth about yourself that you are merely one of countless millions, that you are not worth any more than anyone else, this is a terrible, perhaps unbearable assault on one's pride. Maybe this is particularly true for performers, for whom each concert is a confirmation that we are indeed special - we have all of these people clapping and cheering for only us, it must be true! I believe this is one of the great pitfalls for any performer - the danger of thinking one is special. I think it is the antithesis of what music should be about: a performer sharing his feelings and implicitly saying, 'This is what it is to be human, this is what we share'. But to try and maintain, or even reach this state is a constant battle, for me at least. One of the greatest performances I ever heard was Mario Joao Pires playing the Schumann concerto at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago. It was a performance that was far from perfect and rather underpowered, but what shone through was a profound humility, and that touched me in a way that I had only experienced listening to Clara Haskil's recordings. I went to meet her after to tell her how deeply touched I had been by her playing and she seemed genuinely surprised and grateful that someone would enjoy her playing.

Somehow I have drifted far from Iceland! Suffice to say, the trip lived up to all my expectations. I found the people marvellous - thinking, positive, down-to-earth. Before the Messiaen, the concert began with a premiere of Þuríður Jónsdóttir's flute concerto, played by Mario Caroli. I have to say, I loved this, both for the tremendous performance and for the rather beautiful piece which seemed entirely it's own thing; unpretentious, with wonderful colours and a very savvy structural sense. Both conductor and orchestra were doing the Messiaen for the first time and I was extremely impressed. They have been nominated for a Grammy this year, by the way. In the end, though, the highlight was a night trip to one of the hot springs in the middle of nowhere. Swimming in 38 degree water with the air temperature minus 11, under the moon and stars, this was something unforgettable. …

NEWS: TIPPETT CD NOMINATED FOR BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE AWARDS

23 January 2009 GMT

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Working with Dietrich Henschel

16 January 2009 GMT

Last Tuesday I performed Schwanengesang with Dietrich Henschel at the Wigmore Hall. This was the first of a series of concerts with music from the end of Schubert's life, the others comprising the piano trios, the last 3 sonatas, and the late piano duets (these will happen in the next couple of years). It's the first time I've 'headhunted' a musician to work with: when I decided on this project I didn't know who the singer would be. In the process of listening to many CDs, Henschel stood out for me as a musician with a sensibility I felt I could strongly relate to - his focus seemed to be very much about musical line and structure, and I also liked his willingness to take his voice to extremes. I'm very opinionated about other musicians - I think it's maybe unavoidable when one is passionate about making music - and one thing that often puts me off singers is an over-preoccupation with beauty of sound. To me it's clear that music often is not beautiful. I remember once rehearsing the Poulenc Sextet and asking the oboe player to play a particular note with a really ugly sound - it seemed to me the right effect. But it was almost a physical impossibility for him to do this, so strong was his mindset (and presumably training) about 'always making a beautiful sound'. To me this is a great shame because it severely limits what you can communicate.

To cut a long story short, I am very excited by this collaboration. We sadly only had one concert together; it would have been nice to do the programme a few times and get really comfortable performing together. But regardless of this, the process of rehearsing was so absorbing for both of us that I strongly suspect we will be performing together for years to come. He is a musician whose approach to music I profoundly respect and I have the sense there is a lot we can learn from each other. …

Rachmaninov preludes recording

09 January 2009 GMT

Back in August I recorded the complete Rachmaninov preludes and it was quite an amazing experience: I've never felt so free and uninhibited in a recording session. Strangely (or maybe not?) I was quite depressed the night after the final day of recording - I felt so strongly how much expressive possibility there is in this music and how impossible it is to really capture that on record. You have to choose between many wonderful options - if only you could have them all at once! So for the first time I saw an inherent sadness in recording: there is so much I want to say with these pieces and some of those things can't coexist in the same performance. To put it rather melodramatically, it's like having to choose which of your children you keep. Maybe if I had children I wouldn't dare to make such a connection, but I think it's common for musicians to have such a strong connection to music that it really feels a part of them, and so to reject some aspect of the music can feel like a betrayal.

All the editing is done now, and I'm relatively happy with the results. I can't ask for more: when I hear one of my CDs for the first time I always hope to be overwhelmed by the music as I was when I played it, but I think this really is impossible. I listen too analytically, and too aware of the possibilities in the music that I missed. Maybe some day I'll be able to listen as if it's someone else playing; then it would probably be much easier to be objective.

Here are the liner notes which I wrote for the CD. It comes out in May.

"Recently as I was exploring a book shop I saw the banner 'Tragic Life Stories' over an entire wall of books. I laughed, but I could have cried, and not in the way the authors presumably hope. What a bizarre phenomenon this is, the sudden emergence of a genre of writing which apparently delights in describing personal misery at its most heart-breaking.

"Why do I mention this? Well, I adore Rachmaninov's music - there are few composers who speak to me more directly. Yet I know a number of musicians, including some whose opinion I greatly respect, who think his music shallow, even cheap. I have a suspicion that for some of them, the music is a bit like one of these stories - not so much emotionally explicit as manipulative, calculated to draw the maximum sympathy from a credulous audience. (At least, this is what appears to underlie the famous entry in the 1954 Grove Dictionary which laments Rachmaninov's 'artifical and gushing tunes'.) It may be a tempting response to a composer whose music fit seamlessly into the classic film Brief Encounter, but the charge doesn't really stand up to scrutiny: listening to Rachmaninov's piano playing, one hears a clarity and emotional discretion which is the very antithesis of such sensationalism.

"I cannot dismiss all 'Rachmaninophobics' so easily, and there is an issue here which interest me: what does it mean for music to have depth? Compare Rachmaninov's music to Schubert's, and it seems to me clear that the latter contains much greater complexity of emotion. Schubert's late works in particular blend innocence, violence, sublime playfulness, humility, dread, and innumerable other emotions in the most potent fashion; as a result, there are very many ways of understanding his music depending on how one balances these conflicting elements. With Rachmaninov there is one element which dominates: a sense of melancholy to which his music returns again and again. Correspondingly, there is less ambiguity to the music. Does this make it less deep, less meaningful? I think the better response is to say it is less complex, because Rachmaninov expresses more profoundly than almost anyone else what it means to feel hopeless, to long for what is unattainable; the depth of feeling is, to me at least, unquestionable. This helps me make sense of the antipathy some have towards Rachmaninov's music. The more ambiguous a piece of music is, the more likely we will find personal meaning in it. If, however, we are directly confronted with a rather depressive musical world, it is understandable that some will find that threatening, self-indulgent, or else simply uninteresting.

"I am overstating the case to make my point. Rachmaninov's music can contain a wonderful variety of mood, as these preludes clearly show. Still, it is worth asking how many pieces here reflect a truly positive, outgoing frame of mind. Even the most sunny and ebullient, those in Bb, C, E and Ab major, all have their moments of inwardness, the last three of these ending with a kind of retreat into privacy. I think this is a telling instinct in music which is otherwise so open, suggesting that the pull of introversion was difficult for Rachmaninov to overcome.

"Tragic Life Stories notwithstanding, it is possible to write an account of a difficult life which transcends the details of abuse or neglect (as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes triumphantly shows). I think there is a real sense in which Rachmaninov's music tells us such a story. It may be dominated by the pain and sadness of his life but it expresses much else besides, and when we reach the astonishing climax of the final prelude, I find it impossible not to be deeply moved that a man like Rachmaninov was capable of creating such a rich and life-affirming gesture."

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A month of Messiaen

15 December 2008 GMT

For the past month I have played virtually nothing in concert except Messiaen - the Quartet for the End of Time in various places, Turangalila Symphony in Munich, and the Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus in London. Strange to say, given how physically demanding this music is, but for me it has been like a kind of holiday, because I find I need to give the music virutally no thought before playing it. Of course, it wasn't always like this, and certainly over the years I have thought a lot about these pieces, but compared to most other music there are very few interpretative decisions to make about Messiaen's music - once you decide on the speed and the basic mood much of it simply works itself out.

I do feel a particularly strong connection to this music. Sometimes I'm asked after playing the Vingt Regards whether I am religious. I used to be deeply religious (and even imagined I could have become a minister) but am no longer. The connection I feel is more to do with the great range of the music, from the deepest calm to the most enormous energy, even violence; I feel these extremes in myself.

So it has been a month of many satisfying concerts, with some wonderful colleagues: playing the quartet with Kari Kriikku, Viviane Hagner and one of my closest friends, Alban Gerhardt, and working with the marvellous Jun Maerkl and the Munich Philharmonic. But most satisfying of all was a performance at the Wigmore Hall on Saturday of the Vingt Regards, a mammoth work for solo piano which lasts over 2 hours without a break. Giving a concert is a bit like playing a slot machine - there are many elements which are out of your control, like the spinning reels, and you have to hope at least most of them land in your favour. On Saturday it felt like I hit the jackpot. The hall is of course marvellous, the piano had great range, colour and beauty, I felt absolutely relaxed, and the audience was unbelievably attentive and concentrated. I felt many things after this concert: principally, I felt like king of the world, I felt humbled by what the audience contributed by their attention, and I felt sad it had to end. It is a strange transition moving from such a rapt state of mind back to everyday life and it helps to have some company in the hours following a concert. So I went to a Turkish restaurant with my manager, Emma, a good friend from Hyperion records, Mike Spring, and a great Australian conductor (are there ANY unpleasant Australians, by the way?) Matt Coorey. We ordered 3 Healthy Meals to share. There was no option for an Unhealthy Meal. …

The joy of hotel rooms

05 December 2008 GMT

It's 1.45am in Munich and I can't sleep. Hotel rooms can be depressing places at times.

Nevertheless, it has been a stimulating and varied day, in between performances of Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony with the Munich Philharmonic and Jun Maerkl yesterday, tomorrow and Sunday. I started learning Stravinsky's Concerto for PIano and Winds; met out of the blue Tim Busby, an old colleague of Jeannie from Singapore; received the 1st edit of my CD of Rachmaninov preludes which I am avoiding listening to (the first listen is often rather painful); and went to one of the most disappointing concerts of my life, the Herbie Hancock Sextet (the Gasteig acoustics are far too resonant for jazz, on top of which the playing was simply baffling and self-indulgent, to my ears at least. I didn't even make it to the end of the first half). On top of this, I just finished reading Sophie's World which I enjoyed greatly and was mildly disturbed by, for reasons I can't go into so as not to spoil it for those of you who haven't read it.

So what do you do with a surfeit of stimulation at 1.45 in a Munich hotel? Apart from write a blog post, that is. I have nothing else to read, I hate watching TV late at night, and there's no space to do Tai Chi in the room. I could look for creepy-crawlies in the bed (I had to move rooms because the first one had a minor infestation - that's a first for me) but that just breeds paranoia. I can get a bit phobic about insects. Soon after I met Jeannie we took a trip to Glen Coe and when we went to bed in the guest house I discovered there were a few midgies in the room. Well, those buggers can smell me from 500 metres so I spent the next 20 minutes squashing them against the walls. And Jeannie still married me! Enough rambling.

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Stéphane Denève

16 November 2008 GMT

It's been a while since my last post and rather than give you a blow by blow account, I'll focus on one of the most fun aspects of the last couple of months - working with Stéphane Denève at the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

I often find musical chemistry goes absolutely along with personal chemistry, and with Stéphane all of this seems to work rather effortlessly. It helps that I've met him a number of times since he took over the directorship of the RSNO. One thing which I greatly appreciate - he takes the job of collaborating on a concerto very seriously and gives a lot of time to meet with the soloist before rehearsing. We did two different concertos in the last month - Brahms 2 and Rachmaninov 2. For the Brahms we talked and discussed for about an hour before playing with the orchestra; understandable perhaps because this is such a complex piece to put together. But the Rachmaninov took 2 hours talking together! I've never had an experience like this, working with a conductor who puts forward his ideas as being equally important to mine (normally they defer to the soloist). I think it led to a wonderful collaboration, with both of us responding to the strengths in each other's idea of the works, and offering some solutions to the weaknesses. The Rachmaninov is particular was something of a relevation to me. I hadn't played this work for many years so was rather open to new ideas, and I really learned a lot from Stéphane's view of the piece. It's very easy with these 'war horses' to take in all the normal conventions without much thought, no matter how much one tries to think of the piece afresh, and Stéphane opened my eyes to just how radical the shape of the first movement is, one enormous arc of increasing then decreasing speed. The concert, in Manchester, was probably one of the best of my life, which was very much influenced by the musical and personal connection I felt with Stéphane. In music, as in marriage, it helps a lot if you like your partner! …

Britten recording magazine article

16 November 2008 GMT

Like buses, you wait months for a blog entry then 2 come along at once. This is an article I was asked to write for the German magazine 'Piano News', talking about the experience of recording Britten's works for piano and orchestra.

"Recording is a fascinating and deeply stimulating business. I know some people have a 'moral' problem with it, as if it's fundamentally dishonest to create a composite performance out of many different takes, but I've never shared that view. Stephen Hough has a good line about it - the difference between concerts and recording is similar to the difference between acting in the theatre and in film. In both cases, the latter option utilises much more sophisticated technical means to create an idealised end-result. The danger in recording is that any sense of spontaneity and inspiration can be lost in the process, but equally much can be gained - one is able to reflect in great detail on the effectiveness of each musical gesture in one's interpretation with an intensity that is difficult to find in any other context. One of the strange things about being a musician is the difference between how the music feels when you play it and how it sounds in the auditorium, and I find it is almost inevitable when I hear a recording of one of my concerts that I am shocked by many things - how fast or slow something sounds, how I misjudged the pacing here or there, how much better this passage sounds than it felt, how much worse that one.... When I finish a recording, I am always left with a greatly deepened understanding of how to show directly to the listener what I feel about the music. This is both exhilarating and, frankly, a little horrifying ('how could I have been so ignorant about the music before?').

"Normally I bring an idea for a record to Hyperion to consider but in this case it was the other way round - they suggested to me the complete concertante piano works of Britten. I don't learn music very quickly so I'm quite choosy about what I take on, but immediately this was a project which excited me: I found so much interest, character and beauty in these works which are so seldom played, even in Britain (I don't remember seeing even one of them programmed). The concerto is a marvellous piece, full of energy and colour and contrasts, utterly exhilarating to play. Young Apollo has a wonderful lightness of touch and some great effects. But best of all is Diversions which, to me, is something of a masterpiece. How is it possible that a work so inventive, touching, witty and serious remains virtually unknown? Perhaps the answer is simple - it's a nightmare to learn. Written for only the left hand, at times one has to virtually defy the laws of physics to fit everything in. And there is your right hand sitting in your lap doing nothing; that's really cruel.

The recording process was a little unusual for me in that I had a cold which peaked on the first day in the studio. This day passed in something of a haze with my brain struggling to connect to my fingers. At times like these, one is very reliant on one's producer to assess the quality of what is being played, and I'm lucky to have made all my records with one of the best in the business, Andrew Keener, a man with great ears, musical instincts, and human understanding. Andrew has got me through many less-than-ideal situations and this time was no different. The remaining days of recording were much happier. I have worked with Ilan Volkov often and have great respect for his serious, insightful musicianship and prodigious technical skills. Likewise, I have a long and happy association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. I think they were the first professional orchestra I ever worked with and I've had many friends in its ranks, not least my sister-in-law. I think everyone was aware that we were making a great record and by the end there was the closest thing to a party atmosphere as I've experienced in the recording studio. The best thing of all, though, was going to the pub afterwards, buying a beer, and staring vacantly at the wall. After three days of the most intense concentration, this feels like the most blissful thing in the world." …

NEWS: Complete Tippett Piano Music CD nominated for a Gramophone Award

29 August 2008 GMT

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Jerusalem quartet and anti-Israeli protests

29 August 2008 GMT

I attended a remarkable concert this morning given by the Jerusalem Quartet at the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh which was repeatedly interrupted by anti-Israeli protesters shouting slogans like 'Israeli army musicians'. It seemed for a while that the concert might have to be abandoned, for each time a protester was ejected and the concert continued, another would shout out within a few minutes. The festival director, Jonathan Mills, made a very astute announcement after the 3rd or 4th interruption - 'The quartet and I are betting that there are more movements left in the concert than protestors'. This established a sense of optimism in the audience, and it also turned out to be true: the 2nd half proceeded without incident. During the interval, I talked to one of those protesting outside to try and work out why he thought it was appropriate to blame civilians for the actions of their government. 'They were in the army' was one justification, this despite his knowing there is conscription in Israel. 'They haven't publicly condemned their governments' actions' was another. I pointed out that I haven't publicly condemned the Iraq invasion which he thought was illegal, yet he wasn't picketing outside my concert yesterday. In the end his justification was this - 'the disruption is a small price to pay for liberating Palestine'. He believed his groups' actions were building support for his cause; clearly he couldn't see the audience reaction inside the hall. What I find most strange about this attitude is that it is following just the kind of thinking which leads to the events he condemns: it dehumanises some to further the cause of others. By definition, civilian casualities must be a 'price worth paying' for both the Israeli army and the Palestinian suicide bombers or they would change tactics. I don't want to discuss the politics of this - I'm too uninformed and besides know that feelings run so extremely high on both sides of this debate. But I'm reminded of a passage in Shostakovich's memoir Testimony. He reflects on the way in which socialisms' ideals of caring for all men equally resulted in such a disfunctional Russian society and writes something like, 'You should never talk about loving the world. Try loving one person first. It's incredibly difficult, it's almost impossible to love one person without hurting someone else.' These protestors think they care about the Palestinians but if they care nothing for the feelings of 4 musicians and 900 audience members right next to them, how can they care about those thousands of miles away? I suspect, rather, that they hate the symbol of oppression that Israel is to them, and the Palestinians are bit-players in that internal drama.

All of which is to frame what a remarkable group the Jerusalem quartet are - they continued to play in the most engaged and creative fashion despite these frequent interruptions. For me, they represent chamber music at its best - all four are fantastic instrumentalists, capable of both playing utterly soloistically and also blending wonderfully. They have a fabulous range of colour, keen structural instincts, wit, seriousness, spontaneity, and enormous depth of feeling. I've played a few concerts with them, all of which were marvellous experiences, but hearing them from the audience's point of view gave me even greater respect for them. How many better quartets in the world can there be? …

Edinburgh Festival jump-in

28 August 2008 GMT

The poor old Edinburgh Festival has had a tough couple of days: last night the Dresden Staatskapelle had to cancel their concert because their instruments were stuck in a lorry in Prague. Tonight Hélène Grimaud is having to change from the Schumann piano concerto to Beethoven 4 because of a finger injury. And this morning I replaced Ivan Moravec who was unable to play a recital due to ill health. These occasions always arouse mixed feelings; of course, one is sad for the indisposed musician, but one also enjoys having the opportunity. For me, this is particularly true of Edinburgh's Queens Hall. I grew up attending and playing in concerts there, and it remains one of my absolute favourite venues with it's combination of great intimacy, acoustic and piano.

In a strange way, it's quite fun doing jump-ins like this - the lack of preparation can be really advantageous to the quality of performance, adding to the spontaneity and sense of danger (I had 2 days to prepare). Whether that was true today, I don't know. I didn't quite get into the first half, partly because 11am is a really tough time to play a concert, partly because I'm experimenting with how I play Beethoven in anticipation of a recording next month. The second half felt better but Jeannie tells me the first wasn't too shabby. It's actually very important to have people whose opinion you trust in these matters - often the impact of a concert is very different from how it feels on stage, and Jeannie always gives me illuminating feedback. In fact, I first started falling for her when we went to a jazz club in Singapore and she started talking about the drummer's sense of swing - 'a chick that knows her jazz?' That got me really interested. The black dress didn't hurt either.

You can judge for yourself at lunchtime 11th September on BBC Radio 3: Debussy-Childrens Corner, Beethoven-Waldstein sonata and 5 pieces from Messiaen's Vingt Regards. …

Spontaneity? It's just not cricket

30 July 2008 GMT

I've just come back from a couple of days teaching at the Cadenza! summer music course which is organised (in a wonderfully chaotic manner) by John Thwaites of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. The highlight of this was an amazing evening of chamber-music by staff and students, whose tone was set by a sight-read performance of Tchaikovsky's piano trio by John, Daniel Rowland and Alexander Baillie. Some people would have felt inhibited by the lack of preparation but these players created the most vivid performance of anything I've heard for a very long time, diving with abandon into this most passionate of music, all three alive to each other's spontaneity. It resulted in a performance which was intensely engaging, touching, at times outrageous, and even genuinely funny (quite an achievement with this piece).

Alexander said to me afterwards, "Why don't we play like this all the time?" and I thought it was a great question. My thoughts on this involve sweeping generalisations for which I apologise in advance; I'm well aware this is only really a sketch of an argument. Nevertheless, I wonder if the answer lies, at least partly, in the erstwhile British preoccupation with decorum and politeness (all three Tchaikovsky performers were British, by the way). While such gentility might not be a conspicious part of our current social scene, it still holds a powerful sway over our instincts, I believe. We don't say to someone at the dinner-table 'Pass the salt' but rather 'Could you pass the salt?'. Why the latter? Because the directness of the former seems rude. Even as I write this I am thinking to myself, 'But surely it IS rude'. And yet such directness is commonplace in Russian conversation. Russians aren't very interested in the superficial veneer of civility Brits cultivate. I think sometimes British musicians (and others) are afraid of seeming rude, and prefer to keep musical style within tasteful, polite limits.

What that evening of chamber music really got me thinking about was the relationship between humility and egotism in performance. I have always seen egotism as a great fault and humility a virtue, but I realised that in performance the two need to be held in a dynamic balance. A performer has to be both humble and egotistical, to both respect the musical score and also to impose him/herself on it. This may sound like a contradiction, but I don't think it need be: as you become deeply immersed in a piece of music your instincts gradually start conforming to the musical world you are investigating. I have an instinct to be repelled by performers who put themselves before the music, and yet am relatively comfortable with tasteful but boring playing. I think the truth is both faults are as bad as each other and that to abdicate responsibility for creating a performance of great individuality by hiding behind the thought, 'My job is simply to serve the composer', is as bad as the egotist who doesn't care for the details of what the composer wrote and simply remakes every piece in his own image. This is a complicated area and there's much more that could be written about it. One thing that's for sure, though, is that the idea a performance can simply serve the composer is a fantasy. We cannot help but recreate a piece of music according to our own individual emotional make-up. To hear what music sounds like without a performer's emotional world intervening, listen to this. Awesome. I'll be giving out prizes to anyone who listens to the end.

So how does a performer actually create this balance of humility and ego in performance? I've no idea. Ask me next year. …

Holidays

11 June 2008 GMT

Well I've got a month off from concerts now so I'm taking the opportunity to have a break from the piano for a week or two. My wife's sister and brother-in-law are coming to stay in a couple of months so I'm doing some long overdue DIY - stripping wallpaper and repainting the kitchen and bathroom. I'd like to say this has been very therapeutic but actually it was rather stressful due to my woeful knowledge of electrical wiring. I had to change the switch for the bathroom light and couldn't get it to work again. I'm not telling you what I did - too embarrassing - but after a couple of hours of trying everything I could think of I was ready to call out an electrician. In the event I didn't need to since Edward McKenzie of Midcalder took the time to diagnose the problem over the phone. Great guy. Here, you can even have his phone number: 0800 037103 …

A busy month

11 May 2008 GMT

I've had a constant stream of deadlines over the last month, taking in a lot of repertoire - both Brahms concertos, 3 Beethoven sonatas, Ravel piano trio, Messiaen quartet for the end of time, Messiaen Vingt Regards, Debussy preludes, Shostakovich second piano concerto… It is an interesting discipline preparing so much music at one time because it forces you to focus very clearly on how to minimise practise time on any one piece. Increasingly I find I need less and less time to prepare music I've played before, which I think is down to practising more slowly. I read a wonderful quote from Peter Serkin - "Practising is a very peaceful way to spend the day". This has had a big impact on me, not exactly that I feel like this when I practise but that I find it a very useful ideal to aim for. The closer I get to this, the quicker and easier I am able to work. It reminds me of something my brother Kenneth told me: when he was at St Mary's Music School learning piano as his second study his teacher (and mine - Richard Beauchamp) got him to practise the last movement of a Beethoven sonata. The reason I remember this is that he told me he could still remember the piece by heart many years later. I guess the brain absorbs the material much more quickly when it is given a lot of time in this way. Certainly, I find I can prepare most pieces that are vaguely in my repertoire in 3 or 4 days if I allow myself the time to practise them very slowly. …

Life Before Death

05 April 2008 GMT

This is a series of photographs of people before and after death which I find very moving, as much for the brief descriptions of the people as for the pictures. When I saw Nigel Murray's body a few days after he died it was the first time I'd ever seen a corpse and it was a very important experience, not only to see a dead body but that of a close friend. For all the death and violence in popular culture, the simple fact of death seems to me largely avoided, in Britain at least. Why do we not see the dead at funerals? I think it's important, both to say goodbye to the person and also to put our own lives in perspective. …

Australia tour

02 March 2008 GMT

I'm just back after 5 weeks away from home, an unusually long absence for me. Touring is something I'm only just starting to enjoy, actually. In the past, long trips would make me a bit crazy; it's partly the endless hotel rooms, alarm clocks going off at 5am that you didn't set, airport security lines, bad pasta etc. etc. and partly the sense of dislocation, being constantly out of your element. Home is important to me. I live in the town where I grew up and where my parents still live, a fairly quiet place between Edinburgh and Glasgow called Linlithgow, surrounded by farmland, with it's own loch and palace (birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots for you history buffs). When I returned to live here after years in northern England I felt an enormous relief to be back in such familiar surroundings. I guess people who travel a lot with their profession find different ways of dealing with it, and for me a strong home base seems to be important.

This last trip to Australia felt much less gruelling than comparable trips have been in the past. I did a 2 week tour under the auspices of Musica Viva with the Goldner Quartet, a couple of solo recitals, a week with the Melbourne Symphony under Oleg Caetani (genius Shostakovich conductor), and just before getting back to Scotland, a week with the DSO Berlin and Ingo Metzmacher (genius Messiaen conductor). A lot of factors combined to make this trip as fun as it was: staying with wonderful friends in Sydney, Jeannie joining me for a week in the middle of the trip, great musical experiences in all of these projects and, not least, AUSTRALIAN WEATHER (the Scottish winter has been miserable). What an enormous difference getting up to warm sunshine makes. No wonder Australians are by and large such a relaxed bunch of people. I should also mention how fantastic Musica Viva were at looking after the logistical aspects of the tour. The other important factor is that I feel much more interested now in the places I visit; I used to focus all my energy on my concerts but now feel more able to take time off and enjoy my surroundings. It's probably no coincidence that I'm also enjoying playing more and more.

Arriving in Berlin was a rude awakening. Why is it always so cold there? People tell me it's not but it seems whenever I'm in Berlin I'm freezing. I was staying at Alban Gerhardt's flat, cat-sitting his wife's cats while they were off skiing in Switzerland. Alban is a great friend and colleague, one of the musicians who has taught me the most over the years, so I was really happy he came back to Berlin a couple of days before I left. It was also nice not to have to empty the litter tray any more.

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In memoriam Nigel Murray

27 February 2008 GMT

It seems appropriate to start this blog by talking about my old Director of Music at St Mary's Music School, Nigel Murray, who died of cancer last November aged 64. Nigel's path to this job had been a difficult one, his previous career as a successful freelance violinist in London being cut short by an arm injury. How great a loss this was became clear to us students when he played the solo violin part from Erbarme Dich in a school performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion; it remains one of the deepest musical experiences of my life, a performance whose emotion was only heightened by the sense of his struggle with the instrument.

As a teacher, Nigel was a joy. I accompanied a few of his violin students over the years and his focus always seemed to be on developing musical personality, not competent performances. Once I mentioned how hard I was finding it to decide on a particular tempo in a Mozart concerto and far from trying to provide a simple solution his reply was words to the effect, "Ah yes, I know just what you mean. It's terribly hard, isn't it?" Nigel never shied away from the complexities of making music, but loved to raise questions in our minds, to provoke us to see music in a broader perspective. Above all, he had great faith in us - his sense of pleasure at being around his students was palpable and his way of teaching conveyed a trust that we could find our own answers. He never seemed to place himself above us and had a way of gathering staff around him with a similar mindset. Studying at St. Mary's was a marvellous experience.

Much of my interaction with Nigel came through playing cello in the school orchestra which he conducted with vigorous abandon. He could be unpredictable in concert; I remember a performance of Strauss' Metamorphosen in which the sudden general pause near the end must have lasted a full 10 seconds (it's normally about 2 or 3). I still remember his expression of rapt concentration at that moment, telling of the most intense engagement with the musical drama (not to mention the looks of terror from a few of us wondering whether the downbeat was ever going to come, or whether we were going to be forever stranded on the Queen's Hall stage). It is moments like this that encapsulate how I remember Nigel, a man of enormous vision for whom the purpose of music was both a journey into oneself and the unknown, and to whom music without risk was unthinkable. He never lost this curiosity and passion. I saw him a couple of weeks before he died by which time he was rather frail. As we talked I started telling him about some thoughts I'd been having about rhythm in music which prompted him to exclaim, in full voice, "Aaaah, what a marvellous subject!", before leading him on to talk about rhythm in music, in the body, and in life. He faced his impending death with some apprehension but also great dignity, and when he died I had a sense of having lost one of the great influences on my life, a man who enriched my music-making and my living immeasurably. There will be a memorial concert for him in the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, on the 2nd of June this year, given by colleagues of Nigel and pupils, both current and past, of St Mary's Music School.

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Welcome

01 February 2008 GMT

It's a strange business contemplating what to write in this blog. My initial thoughts were to start by talking about rhythm in music, an obsession of mine, but my wife Jeannie suggested to me that this might be unduly technical. Another option is to relate to you an unending series of triumphant performances and to tell you how many people were moved to tears by the beauty of my playing, but that's not my style. Since you are reading this at all, I assume you have some interest in my concertising so I will talk a bit about this concert and that concert but I expect that the more significant focus of the blog will be on the experience of being a musician. I find it a marvellously fulfilling job, an incredible way to connect to myself and to others. And maybe we'll get around to rhythm in due course. …