In the meantime I’ve been looking through my slightly chaotic archive of pieces by Billy Mayerl, to see if there were any I’d forgotten about. Many of the pieces were posted to me years ago by people who thought I might be interested in learning a particular piece long out of print. Mayerl’s later pieces are intriguing. There seems to come a point when, for better or worse, he abandons the cheery ’syncopated style’ which was his trademark and takes to writing in a kind of early-Debussy style of smoothly flowing quavers and semiquavers. These later pieces have their own charm, but they lack the bite and crunch of his earlier, jazzier numbers. As a pianist, though, I can certainly understand that one might get fed up with writing the kind of ‘Oom-CHAH, oom-CHAH’ jumping bass lines which characterise those pieces and give the pianist’s left wrist such a brutal workout. Oh boy, do I still remember what that felt like when I made the ‘Loose Elbows’ disc!

More on Mayerl is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

‘Desert Island Discs’ is a long-running radio series in which each ‘castaway’ chooses the eight records they’d like to take to an imaginary desert island. In between musical choices, they talk about their lives and speculate about how they’d manage on the island. At the end, they get to choose a book and a luxury they’d like to take with them.

During the week there had been trailers for the programme, mentioning that David Attenborough had chosen ‘a rather surprising luxury’. I was curious to know what it was.

And guess what? It was a piano. Since when is that ‘a rather surprising luxury’?

Yes, OK, as a musician I suppose I’d be bound to feel outraged on behalf of pianos. Perhaps whoever wrote the trailer only meant that it was ’surprising’ for a naturalist to choose a musical instrument – though personally I don’t find it in the least unusual, given people’s breadth of interests. And if I were to be cast away on a desert island, none of my friends would be in the least surprised if my luxury were an raccoon or an otter to keep me company.

Attenborough’s ’surprising luxury’ is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

My disc has been in and out of print for some time now, but people never stop asking where they can get hold of it. It sometimes pops up, for an astonishing variety of prices, on collectors’ websites, and Amazon has recently made individual tracks available as mp3 files. But no record company has shown interest in a new disc of Mayerl’s music.

Recently, at a series of London concerts, several people asked me if I had a new Mayerl recording in the pipeline. I realised I was fed up with saying no. Instead, I’m wondering about recording some new tracks played by me in my own home. In these days of recordings being manicured to within an inch of their lives, I think there could be something special about hearing what a musician sounds like by their own fireside.

My plan is to record some new Mayerl pieces, and sell them track by track as downloads on my website. If it goes well, maybe I’ll move on to other composers.

But first I’d like to get some idea of whether people out there would buy my new Billy Mayerl tracks – pieces that don’t appear on the ‘Loose Elbows’ disc. Feedback would be welcome – either as a ‘comment’ on this post (which will be visible to everyone), or by writing to me privately at susan@susantomes.com. An easy way to do that is to click on the ’send her an e-mail’ link under my tiny photo, in the left hand column of this page.

Billy Mayerl piano music recording project is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

“I don’t really think people get that absorbed in music at the moment,” says Simons. “They’re streaming it, they’re watching YouTube clips. People say ‘I listened to this’ and you think ‘Yeah, did you listen to it on computer speakers?’

This surprised me for several reasons: first, to hear that people ‘don’t get that absorbed in music at the moment’ (not my impression at all, I must say, but I’m in a different field of music). Second, to hear Ed Simons putting forward computer speakers as the better way to listen to music.

If it had been my interview, I would have answered differently – ‘People are listening to music on computer speakers. People say ‘I listened to this’ and you think, ‘Yes, but have you heard us play live? Recordings are nothing in comparison.’

Listening on computer speakers is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

At the concert there were two different string quartet groups, giving me the chance to listen to two of my favourite violinists as quartet leaders. Readers of this blog already know how much I admire Viennese violinist Erich Höbarth, with whom I’m halfway through a Mozart Series in Perth Concert Hall. The other quartet was led by American violinist Daniel Phillips of the New-York-based Orion Quartet.

Both these players are to my way of thinking ideal examples of how to approach chamber music. Their performances are totally focused, without ever showing off or deliberately drawing attention to themselves for effect. Many musicians add a layer of ‘mime’ to signal their feelings and point out certain musical twists and turns to the audience. I can’t dismiss this kind of approach, as I know from experience that many audience members like it, even rely on it. However, speaking for myself, I’m more fascinated by musicians whose gestures are economical and whose concentration draws the audience in. Any dramatic visual effects arise from their efforts to express the music, but otherwise their understanding is transmitted entirely in sound. It feels as if the music is too important for mere display. This is not to say, of course, that they are not interesting to watch – on the contrary. They are interesting precisely because they are not trying to manipulate what I see.

Not showing off is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

I felt some kind of vicarious pleasure in the success of the film precisely because it is such an unlikely one to do well in today’s climate of in-your-face, crank-up-the-volume movies. It left me with the happy feeling that if you follow your instinct and insist on doing what you believe in, you’ll be sure eventually to find people who appreciate your work – lots of them, in the case of The Artist.

‘The Artist’ is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

The Independent five-star review of the first concert

The Guardian review of the first concert

The Guardian five-star review of the second concert

I was hoping to post reviews of the third and final concert on 13 January, but to my surprise there don’t seem to have been any. If you know of any reviews, please drop me a line to susan@susantomes.com

Florestan Trio reviews is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

Our waiter glided away and came back with two more carrot muffins which he said would ‘make up a nice number for the family’. He took the three muffins away to pack them up. When it was time to leave, however, I had forgotten all about them. We left the restaurant and had walked a block away when we heard running footsteps behind us, and there was our beaming waiter in his stripey apron, pursuing us with a beautifully-packed blue bag of muffins. Talk about looking after your customers!

Exit, pursued by a waiter is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

While she was working on the translation this week, Noriko sent me this charming photo of her little black cat watching over her, with Japanese New Year decorations in the background. You can see my book on the floor, as well as Noriko’s dictionaries and the notebook in which she writes her translations longhand.

My Japanese colleagues is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

Gradually, however, as I acquired more and more performing experience, there came a point when I couldn’t help realising that I did actually know a lot more about certain pieces than my students did. I also discovered how to put certain things into words, or more to the point, I gained the confidence to say them. I’m still inspired by  Sebök’s dazzling powers of observation, but in the meantime I’ve also found that young musicians’ hunger for new ideas can be inspiring in itself.

So I’d like to thank everyone who took the trouble to get in touch over Christmas and say that they’d enjoyed working with me. I enjoyed it too. A very Happy New Year!

New Year greetings is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

One of our Christmas presents this year was Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet, a wonderful new book of baking recipes – breads, cakes, pies, desserts. The word ‘short’ presumably refers to pastry and not to the book itself, which is notably long (and sweet).

My eye fell almost at once on the cheesecake recipes. I often try to make cheesecake, using various recipes, but am rarely satisfied with the results. I’ve never really managed to replicate the first cheesecake I ever loved, sold at the cheese stall in Cambridge market in my student days. Immoderate consumption thereof was probably one reason why I put on so much weight in my first student year.

Anyway, on Boxing Day I thought I’d have a go at Dan Lepard’s recipe for East End Cheesecake, the closest he says he could get to the famous variety sold by Grodzinski’s bakery. My cheesecake looked lovely on a sky-blue plate at a dinner that evening. Before I had tried it myself, a couple of my guests tasted theirs and suddenly cut across the conversation with glad cries of, ‘Wow! This is gorgeous.’ It was, too. The ingredients were not so different from other cheesecakes I’ve made, but there were a couple of innovations in the method, notably the instruction to boil cream and butter, and to pour this boiling liquid onto the cream cheese before mixing. That slightly caramelised cream-and-butter combo gave a delectable fillip to the taste, evoking a high-class Middle European Konditorei rather than a suburban kitchen. So Dan Lepard’s ‘East End’ recipe is my new favourite.

Short and Sweet is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

‘I’m making my Mum’s Christmas present’, she replied. ‘It’s a pair of long socks with the opening lines of ‘Beowulf‘ knitted into them. I’ve been at it since May! My Mum loves Beowulf.’ I looked closer and saw that, indeed, the socks were covered with tiny words in Old English script. To make it even more impressive, the basic colour of the socks was a kind of oatmeal, with the tiny letters standing out in a delicate mushroom brown, so the effect was subtle unless you knew what you were seeing.

After I had realised that an artwork was unfolding in front of me, I couldn’t concentrate on my book, but had to keep sneaking a look at the tiny Anglo-Saxon words as they emerged from the gently clicking needles. I don’t remember when I last saw anything so skilful.

Beowulf is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

‘In this second of the series, the supreme level of partnership was maintained, and the plus was that the works were even better…. Hearing this partnership, you could believe that no-one could play these works better, ‘ wrote Ian Stuart-Hunter in the Perthshire Advertiser.

The photo shows Erich and me at the end of our rehearsal.

Perth Advertiser review is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

You can listen again to Erica Jeal’s recommendations here.

‘Best modern recording of Schumann’s D minor Trio’ is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

But it seems that a widget is a clever little package of information, in this case about my book ‘Out of Silence’. Its publisher, Boydell Press, is embracing widgets as a new kind of promotional material. If you click on this link, the wonders of widgets will open before your eyes. By clicking on the little coloured icons along the top of the widget’s homepage, you can read excerpts from the book, look at pictures, listen to a sound clip of me playing the piano, link to social networks, recommend the book to friends, and order the book from the publisher.

Boydell’s widget is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

The Portrait Gallery is in a most attractive old building and always has interesting exhibitions. Moreover, it has a very nice cafe. Before it closed for renovation, the cafe used to serve delightful cheese scones, large and golden-brown with a real ‘kick’ of cheese. I missed these scones during the two-year closure, and was worried that they would have disappeared from the menu when the Gallery re-opened. Cheekily, I e-mailed the Gallery’s management team to ask. With perfect politeness they replied that yes, indeed, cheese scones would be back on the menu, and they hoped I would enjoy my visit. They did not reproach me for having my priorities all wrong. I feel this is the mark of a civilised establishment.

I already knew they were civilised. Some years ago I visited the Gallery when I had awful bronchitis. In one of the exhibition rooms I was overtaken by a bout of coughing so bad that I thought I might need medical help. One of the attendants brought me a chair, and quietly cleared the room of visitors. I sat there gradually getting my breath back, watched silently by the famous Scots gazing down at me from their frames.

Cheese scones is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

You can read the Herald interview here.

Herald interview is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

‘Shall I ask you to try again, or is there no point?’

‘You line the notes up in front of you and shoot them one by one.’

‘Between you and music there is a brick wall forever fixed.’

‘Yours is the sort of playing I’ve spent 25 years of my life trying to stamp out.’

As an occasional teacher myself, I find it distressing that people are so impressed by devastating criticism. Maybe I come from a different tradition; at any rate, I wouldn’t allow myself to say those kind of humiliating things to students. When I’m in the audience at a masterclass I quite often think, ‘Yes, I might have made that same point myself, but I wouldn’t have made it like that, for God’s sake!’  Direct criticism, yes; humorous observations, yes; but not humiliating remarks. As a student I found that mean remarks from a teacher just made me feel very detached and remote. I didn’t respect them more for being horrid to me. Therefore I’m surprised by how many people can somehow persuade themselves that being verbally mauled by ‘a master’ has done them good. They might have been hurt or angry at the time, but they eventually find a way to look back on it and say that it was a transformative experience. At the very least, they come to think that it has enhanced their coping strategies.

For the audience there’s an theatrical frisson to a masterclass in which a student gets savaged. It feels a bit like watching those nature programmes in which a huge aggressive polar bear, rampaging around in a territorial dispute, sits down on a baby bear and crushes it. It’s horrifying but awe-inspiring.

Some ‘masters’ play to the gallery in this respect, courting laughter and the shocked intake of breath. You’d think students on the receiving end of their larger-than-life jibes would hate the teachers for it, but they don’t; there seems to be something in human psychology which makes us feel there is ‘more truth’ in wounding remarks than in the same advice considerately given.

Coping with unkind remarks is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

Conway Hall (25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, London WC1) is Europe’s longest-running chamber music series, and has been going since 1887. The series has gone through some wobbly patches, partly due to its policy of making tickets affordable for everyone, but the new organisers are determined to pursue this long-running idealistic policy. Even today the price of admission is only £8, or £4 for concessions. Very unusually, you cannot buy tickets in advance – which makes it a slightly nerve-racking experience for all concerned! So please just turn up on the night and come to hear Mozart, Ligeti and Schumann. The start time of 6.30pm is unusual too – but rather a good idea, I think, because it means people can eat afterwards without making it a very late evening.

Sunday at Conway Hall is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog

Like several of his compatriots, such as Sandor Vegh, Gyorgy Sebok and Gyorgy Kurtag, Rados’s style of teaching is intense, vivid and unpredictable. He speaks very quietly, so in a big hall we all had to strain to hear. He focuses above all on how to make the underlying structure of the music clear. He also talks a lot about how to read the ‘grammar’ of each musical sentence. Today he said that even if a piece of music seems to be in a language we do not yet know, we can still sense whether the shape of a musical sentence is plausible – whether syllables are being articulated, whether there is movement through the sentence, whether there is space to breathe. I don’t know whether this ‘parsing’ of musical phrases works in all types of music (not all music resembles speech, after all), but treating music as if it were a compelling piece of oratory often brings it to life in a very immediate and satisfying way.

His determination to do justice to the music sometimes makes him ruthless towards the performers. This is a very different style of teaching than the one we’re used to here, particularly in our present era of ’supporting the student and bolstering their self-esteem’. Bolstering their self-esteem appears to play no part in the Hungarian method; on the contrary, it often feels (as one of the participants said afterwards) as if the intention is to make them realise how small they are, and what a long way there still is to go. Some people rise wonderfully to the challenge ; others just clam up and turn away. I think most people sense that the focus is on the greatness of the music, not the ego of the performer; that’s as it should be, but it’s asking a lot for young musicians to respond instantly and positively in front of an audience containing their friends, tutors, agents, and competitors.

My favourite moment today was when Rados spoke about the many different ways to play something quietly. ‘You seem to think that ‘piano’ is always something lovely, sweet, tender, melodic, romantic,’ he said to one of the groups. ‘But it can be so many different things. Here, for example, it is a secret fortissimo!’ He chuckled and went on in a low tone, ‘You know, in a Hitchcock movie, the most dangerous words are whispered.’

‘The most dangerous words are whispered’ is a post from the Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer blog