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Apr 8, 2019
Life in Teaching: Diana Cummings
Diana Cummings comes from a musical dynasty, and her career spans solo, chamber and orchestral playing. Since 1982 has been a professor...
Apr 8, 2019
Life in Teaching: Stefan Popov
Stefan Popov has been professor of cello at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama for 40 years, and before that taught at Boston...
Apr 8, 2019
Life in Teaching: Thomas Martin
Double bassist Thomas Martin studied with Roger Scott in Philadelphia and can trace a teaching pedigree that goes back to Bottesini. In a...
Aug 25, 2017
Happy Birthday, Ivry Gitlis!
The charismatic, idealistic, often contrarian and utterly unique violinist is 95 years young today. In celebration, here is an interview...
Nov 16, 2015
Pinchas Zukerman on how to change the world
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra celebrates its 70th birthday in 2016 and for its commemorative anniversary booklet, I had the...
Apr 27, 2015
Interview with Shmuel Ashkenasi
The former Vermeer Quartet leader and Curtis Institute professor discusses the negative sides of Ilona Fehér's 'tough love' school of...
Nov 13, 2014
Songs in the key of life
An understanding of the characteristics of the different keys can help you develop a palette of sounds. So do you know your innocent C...
Nov 11, 2014
The unbearable lightness of being Gary Hoffman
Gary Hoffman is one of the music world’s best-kept secrets, a fine and uncompromising cellist whose rare appearances mesmerise. For him,...
Nov 10, 2014
Eugene Drucker on Beethoven
I recently interviewed Eugene Drucker about his Southbank Centre concert with the Emerson Quartet on Sunday, 16 November, which you can...
Aug 29, 2014
Everything you need to know about violin playing (but were never taught)
Musical timing and closure, hearing and thinking for ourselves – just some of the things that teaching often fails to help us with,...
Aug 26, 2014
A plea on behalf of amateur violinists
Two weeks at a violin practice retreat were life-changing for me, but left me wondering why there aren't enough places for amateur...
Aug 21, 2014
Leopold Auer weighs in on the vibrato debate
Responses to my post about Menuhin's vibrato drew a mixture of responses. I’d remarked on it being ‘perfectly shaped’ and ‘fluid’ and...
Aug 8, 2014
The shortcut to perfection? Or tendinitis?
The British Pathé YouTube archive is proving to be a charming source of films about the violin, in all its forms. Here is a soundless...
Aug 6, 2014
An innovative solution to peg turning
I just came across this delightful footage on the British Pathé YouTube channel. It shows a class of 'budding Kreislers' from 1940...
Aug 3, 2014
How Sheila Nelson made me love the violin
You probably didn’t know that my mother was also a journalist – the apple never falls far from the tree, as they say. She was the...
Jul 5, 2014
Sheila Nelson and her work in Tower Hamlets
In the 1980s, string pedagogue Sheila Nelson took her seminal teaching techniques to underprivileged schools in the London borough of...
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