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...
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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 16, 2014
Ivry Gitlis charms in the streets of Paris
I don't speak French well but it doesn't matter when watching this video. It's worth it just to see a young Ivry Gitlis play, talk,...
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 12, 2014
Celebrating Carlos Kleiber
I came late to the Kleiber party – I was introduced to him only recently by Burton Kaplan while I was on his Magic Mountain music course....
Jul 11, 2014
Tough decisions about violinists
Research has begun on my list of top 20 violinists for Sinfini Music. Now I’m not a big fan of definitive lists of anything, as I once...
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 30, 2014
Kopelman Quartet offers lesson in chamber music playing
I'm just back from Wigmore Hall, where I watched the Kopelman Quartet demonstrate chamber music playing at its best: exquisite...
Jun 26, 2014
Arnold Steinhardt: ‘Don’t put your parents in hock to buy a violin’
A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Arnold Steinhardt, leader of the Guarneri Quartet for 40 years, for the Cozio website. Steinhardt is...
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...
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