When I was still at school, my parents introduced me to the work of one of the funniest comedians I have yet discovered: the Danish pianist, Victor Borge. From phonetic punctuation to his re-singing of the entirety of The Magic Flute, Borge had the most superb sense of comic timing,
’Tis the season (well, nearly – I still think the capitalist machine could ease up on the carols for at least another week or two) to be joyful and thankful and kind, and all that stuff. ’Tis also the season, for many musicians, when offers are made of ‘work’ for
As anyone who has the vaguest interest in cinema, DVD collecting, watching the TV or even bus posters will know, superheroes are in. They have been for a while: men of steel, fortuitous victims of nuclear/chemical accidents, test subjects of government projects – heck, even sparkly vampires. They battle the
Last night, as I was making my way home from a day at the British Library, and attempting to exit the station path onto the pavement home, a teenager began peddling towards me on his bicycle. He was aiming for the space between two bollards on the path, so that
In my very first year at senior school, a teacher gave an excellent assembly in which he told the tale of those four well-known characters, Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. It’s quite a popular story – you might have heard it before. It’s called ‘That’s not my job’: There was
On Saturday evening, I had the pleasure of returning to the city where I spent five happy years as a university student – Nottingham – to give a pre-concert talk about Brahms’s First Symphony. As the train rumbled north out of London, I spent a bit of time staring out
I have four e-mail addresses. I marvel at this on a rather regular basis – not least because, when you have four e-mail addresses, remembering to check them all frequently is a constant process of re-remembering their actual existence. The simple reason for this overabundance of communicative channels is that,
It’s taken me a while to write this piece. Don’t think, from my radio silence on the subject, that I haven’t been thinking a lot about the various debates, campaigns and speeches that have emerged for and against the so-called EBacc (English Baccalaureate). But there’s a lot to read, a
In the last few weeks, I seem to have spent a lot of my time thinking about Beethoven. In addition to a lovely session of Music Talks in South Kensington, where I had a live quartet on stage to help me explain the inner workings of the A minor String
This week, it was my birthday. I’m not going to tell you which birthday – but suffice it to say that, if were attempting to follow in the footsteps of a certain bearded composer I much admire, I should have published a Horn Trio and be well into the planning
