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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 27, 2014

Brahms as I’ve never heard him

Last night's Proms concert with the Budapest Festival Orchestra was ravishing, but raised an uncomfortable question I have a friend who...

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 18, 2014

The best vibrato ever?

I came across this footage of Menuhin playing Bach's 'Air on the G String'. Just look at his left hand – is that not the most perfectly...

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...

Aug 1, 2014

A world without musical borders at Ronnie Scott’s

One of my aims with this website is to be a non-denominational space where all forms of string music are equally respected and...

Jul 28, 2014

Are music competitions really so bad?

Julian Lloyd-Webber has come out in The Times against competitions, and accused them of being corrupt. That’s quite a broad brush with...

Jul 28, 2014

Swedish cellist and Tunisian violinist are among Womad highlights

I’m just back from Womad: three days of camping in a field and listening to music from all over the world. I’m sunburnt and have sore...

Jul 25, 2014

Fritz Kreisler: a violinist at war

The First World War began 100 years ago, on 28 July 2014, with Austria–Hungary declaring war on Serbia, a month after the assassination...

Jul 23, 2014

Charles Beare – violin expertise ‘not the real thing’

At first I thought this New Yorker article about the Carpenter family by Rebecca Mead was going to be a puff piece, but it turns out to...

Jul 20, 2014

My latest folk fiddle discovery

I heard this band on in the background playlist at the Green Note in Camden last week and had to stop my conversation, I was so...

Jul 17, 2014

Violin practice is so over-rated

If you've been trying to notch up 10,000 hours of practice in the hope of being deemed talented, spurred on by Malcolm Gladwell's rule...

Jul 15, 2014

Stradivarius violin blind tests – do they matter?

A really interesting article about wine in the New Yorker suggests striking parallels between how we choose wine and our attitudes to...

Jul 15, 2014

The future of music?

I just came across this lovely interview with mandolin super-hero Chris Thile. Thile came to fame as a Bluegrass player but in recent...

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...

Jun 14, 2014

Lionel Tertis offers hair styling advice

I discovered My Viola and I, the autobiography of Lionel Tertis, in the library at Magic Mountain. It's a charming read with great...

Jun 11, 2014

Leading pedagogue blasts luthiers

I discovered this tirade in a seminal string pedagogical work: 'It is most regrettable that our present-day instrument-makers take so...

Jun 6, 2014

Fritz Kreisler: ‘To practise is a bad habit’

I've been raiding the library of the Magic Mountain library and came across The Memoirs of Carl Flesch. He's not the most compelling...

Jun 5, 2014

Fritz Kreisler: Four Weeks in the Trenches

The great violinist served in the Austrian Army during the First World War. Here he gives a moving and deeply humane account of his time...