We've barely crawled out from under our yuletide duvets and a new pop alter-ego has appeared. A$AP Rocky, the Harlem darling of hip hop, announced himself this week as "Pretty Flacko" with a new typic... Read More

Just over a year ago I took part in a brief but interesting discussion on the BBC's Today Programme with Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Fellow of New C... Read More

Have any artists really, truly accomplished the pop/classical crossover? A switch between musical genres is like a banana skin: you will usually end up looking like a fool. Charlotte Church, the Welsh... Read More

So what if the great composers of yesterday were alive today? And had fallen victim to The News of the World’s phone hacking skills… Ludwig van Beethoven: "Ludwig! It’s Manny, your long-suff... Read More

"Hallucinations are bad enough,” wrote Hunter S Thompson. “But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth.” The ... Read More

I'm spending this weekend playing the Grieg concerto with the Houston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Susanna Mälkki.  It struck me recently for some reason that virtually all piano concertos in the... Read More

Leopold Godowsky and Josef Lhevinne both recommended practising with eyes closed, and it's an astonishingly effective technique.  It forces us to use our other senses more acutely … hearing, of... Read More

The Poet Speaks (from Kinderszenen by Robert Schumann played by Alfred Cortot) What makes this clip so extraordinary?  To start with, the playing of course – Schumann's phrases caressed as if ... Read More

And so the end of a year where our concert halls, festivals and broadcasters gave the music of Handel, Haydn, Purcell and Mendelssohn even more prominence than usual. All four celebrated major anniver... Read More

Over the summer I had the radio on in the car when some wonderful Schumann songs came flooding out of the speakers.  After thinking how beautiful they were I was struck for some reason with the thoug... Read More