While I’ve been researching my article on violinists who’ve crossed musical borderlines, for Sinfini Music, I found myself debating with...

Musical timing and closure, hearing and thinking for ourselves – just some of the things that teaching often fails to help us with,...

While we're on the subject of Leopold Auer, it's not possible to mention his roll-call of students without referencing this wonderful...

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...

I came across this lovely film while on my research into classical artists who have explored other genres. It's beautiful to watch the...

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...

I just came across this delightful footage on the British Pathé YouTube channel. It shows a class of 'budding Kreislers' from 1940...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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

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...

I'm just back from Wigmore Hall, where I watched the Kopelman Quartet demonstrate chamber music playing at its best: exquisite...

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Arnold Steinhardt, leader of the Guarneri Quartet for 40 years, for the Cozio website. Steinhardt is...

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...