Amid the commemorations of the start of the First World War, you might like a bit of respectful levity, so here is Charlie Chaplin's...

The great screen comedian was an accomplished amateur violinist who composed many of the scores to his films At the height of his...

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...

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

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

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...

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...

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

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....

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...

In the 1980s, string pedagogue Sheila Nelson took her seminal teaching techniques to underprivileged schools in the London borough of...

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

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