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 Newsweek correspondent at the United Nations in the 60s, as you can read in her compelling 2012 autobiography, Don’t Ask Me Where I Come From. But I only recently discovered that in 1981, she wrote an article about my first violin teacher, Sheila Nelson. Sheila, now 78 and retired, is one of the most respected pedagogues of her generation. Starting

One of my aims with this website is to be a non-denominational space where all forms of string music are equally respected and appreciated. I believe that’s the way the world is going – barriers between music styles around the world are falling, (just as political tribalism is taking hold – but that’s for someone else’s website). As Chris Thile says here: ‘You’ll see so much genre-hopping in the near future that it’ll cease to be genre-hopping. The walls will be so worn that

Julian Lloyd-Webber has come out in The Times against competitions, and accused them of being corrupt. That’s quite a broad brush with which to tar them all. Having been to a fair few string ones during my twelve years at The Strad magazine, and commissioned reports from even more, I’d beg to differ. Admittedly, I tried only to visit competitions myself if I knew they were well-respected, but I don’t remember seeing someone win who didn’t deserve to, from some perspective. Th

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 feet, and never have I been so pleased to see my bed and toilet. But it was worth it for the sheer quantity and variety of music I had a chance to listen to, even if, with seven stages to choose from, I was sometimes quite overwhelmed and had to go and lie under a bush to cool down. There weren’t many string acts to report back on, but the few

The First World War began 100 years ago, on 28 July 2014, with Austria–Hungary declaring war on Serbia, a month after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. I have always been fascinated by the era and at school studied the gut-wrenching poetry that came out of the trenches. I was also a little bit obsessed by the mathematics of time and by working out whether it was possible for the old soldiers to be alive

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 captivated. They are Genticorum and they're from Canada. Their arrangements are just lovely, rich but delicate, and the fiddle player, Pascal Gemme, has a beautiful tone and a precision technique. Here's something to tap your foot to: #violin #fiddle #folk #playing #blog #view

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 formluated in his book Outliers, then wait up a moment. According to new research reported on today in the New York Times, 'practice time explains about 20 percent to 25 percent of the difference in performance in music, sports and games like chess'. This doesn't surprise me. As ever, there's so much more context required in understanding tale

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, charm... #gitlis #stradivarius #violin #violinist #playing #blog

I just came across this lovely interview with mandolin super-hero Chris Thile. Thile came to fame as a Bluegrass player but in recent years has played jazz and classical – his recording of Bach’s violin sonatas and partitas is one of my favourites, and when I interviewed him once he told me how he practises the Barber and Beethoven violin concertos for fun. So it’s unsurprising to hear him talk about how he doesn’t see any essential difference between genres – it’s all the sa

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. The whole class watched a documentary on Kleiber and then his performances of Strauss, Beethoven and Brahms. I was mesmerised. Kaplan was trying to demonstrate to us the musical logic of Kleiber's conducting, but also the narrative quality of his rehearsal technique, to show us how this could inform our own musical conceptions. As you can s

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 wrote in this blog when I was at The Strad. But I’m not pretending that this is a definitive list of the best violinists ever, because that would be untrue and stupid. It is, however, a list of players I consider special, whose playing has touched me in some way. And it does give a lovely chance to sit down and listen to some of the players I

I'm just back from Wigmore Hall, where I watched the Kopelman Quartet demonstrate chamber music playing at its best: exquisite refinement, complete togetherness, impeccable attention to detail. All with their lustrous sound and a whole lot of humour, although possibly a wee bit comfortable. And watching the Russian bow hold in action is a whole violin lesson in itself. It's interesting to me that Russian players rarely use the palette one associates with Russian music - the P