It does, I suppose, give you a sense of achievement when you see all 15 solo Bach CDs assembled in one box. That's what Hyperion has done, and it comes on the market tomorrow. It's all there: the complete Inventions, French Suites, English Suites, Partitas, Goldberg Variations, Toccatas, Italian Concerto, French Overture, Four Duets, Capriccios, Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, the Well-Tempered Clavier (2008 version), and many miscellaneous works. All 1053 minutes worth. My life's work (well, part of it...). Plus a 3500-word essay I wrote on the whole 11-year experience. Of course many of you will already have those recordings, or at least some of them, but perhaps you have a friend who hasn’t got started yet and who would like the whole shebang. I would offer it on my online shop except that it doesn’t fit through the pillar box (UK language for post box) around the corner, and the government very considerately closed our local post office a few years ago. However it’s on offer at a special price through Hyperion’s website and also on www.amazon.co.uk. And before I get yet another e-mail asking me why I haven’t recorded The Art of Fugue, I’ll say that it’s coming up in a few years, both in concert and on disc. So please be patient! That will take up huge reserves of time and energy and private space, especially with all the other non-Bach repertoire I still must do. At the moment I’m reading James Gaines’ “Evening In The Palace of Reason” which also makes me want to do The Musical Offering. There simply isn’t enough time in life for all that interests me. Every moment of every day requires you to choose how to use the time given to us—which is so precious. I realize that now more than ever. But I'm also finding it more fun than ever before, and my enthusiasm is unbounded...so here's to lots more (oh dear!) work!

Oh, and I almost forgot: at the bottom of my "Bach Box" is a 16th (free) sampler CD entitled NOT Bach with excerpts from my other Hyperion recordings: the complete Pathetique Sonata of Beethoven, for instance; the Ravel Sonatine, and works by Handel, Couperin, Rameau, Chabrier, Messiaen, Chopin, Schumann (my still-to-be-released second disc of his music), my own arrangement of Bach's "All Men Must Die", and more. You can read the first review that has appeared on the web by going to the Press page on this website. It's a bit long, but if you make it to the end, you'll read that the reviewer says that if his house were going up in flames, and he had time to rescue something of his CD collection, the only thing he would now take would be this. I hope it's never a decision he needs to take in real life.

I never thought I would enjoy it so much. Normally I only give a masterclass that lasts three hours, on a day when I often have an orchestral rehearsal or am recovering from a big recital the day before. This was the first time ever that I gave one that lasted a week. I was dreading it somewhat—wondering if I would be able to sustain the interest for the pupils, hoping that I wouldn’t get bored. That wasn’t the case at all. Thanks to the students themselves (all girls funnily enough!), we had the most marvellous week together at the Auditorium Marianum in Perugia (the masterclass was a promotion of my Trasimeno Music Festival Association). I had asked the young pianists (aged 18 to 30) to prepare a huge programme (that already demanded a certain level), and we went through vast amounts of repertoire from Bach to George Crumb. The first day and a half were spent on the classics and romantics; then we had an afternoon devoted to Bach, and the girls got so excited that we had to continue the next day. One day we went through seven concertos—2 Bach, 1 Ravel, and 4 Mozart—with me playing the second piano (see photo, along with students from left to right, Annie Yim, Silvie Cheng, and Julia Hamos). They came from Canada, the USA, the UK, and Italy (the others were Harriet Stubbs, and the Duo Dama from Terni here in Umbria who were the recipients of the Pasqualina Pat Adamo Scholarship generously given by one of the festival's Canadian Friends of Italian ancestry). I also took them all to Assisi one evening, and of course out to see Lake Trasimeno. At the final concert they really played so much better than when they first arrived, and I was almost in tears seeing their happiness and progress. But before you all get excited about attending the next one, let me say that this was something quite unique and I won’t have time, I don’t think, next summer to do the same. During my mini-sabbatical it was possible, but next summer is already looking like one of the busiest yet with tons of repertoire, both new and old. So I can’t afford a week when I don’t work on my own things. But perhaps sometime there will be another occasion. I very much hope so.

As I have already announced, my first international masterclass will begin on Tuesday, August 17th at the Auditorium Marianum in Perugia (photos is of the fountain in the main square). Students from Canada, England, and Italy will participate in the daily lessons. We still have room for auditors who may attend either for the whole week or on a daily basis. For admission, please present yourself to the Secretariat of the Auditorium. On August 23rd at 5 p.m. there will be a final concert given by the students of the masterclass. For more information, please write us on masterclasses@trasimenomusicfestival.com

Upon my return to London from Canada, I spent a few days running around the city, fulfilling appointments, going to a Prom (in this case the Deutsche Sinfonie Orchester), and handing in my application for a new Canadian passport. Two days later they called me, saying the Canadian office had asked for clarification about my occupation. For how long have I been a concert pianist? For more than two years?!

In interviews I am often asked what I do in my spare time. Normally I have no spare time so the answer is easy. And it’s not that I have loads of it now, but since I am on my mini-sabbatical from performing (not practising I hasten to add), at least I can do a few things to relax. In the past three weeks they have included: a sumptuous dinner in Middle Temple Hall, London (where Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was first performed) during which actor Simon Russell-Beale was called to the bench as an honorary member; going to the theatre in London (something I love to do but never have time for) to see an excellent production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons with David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker; having yet another clear-out, this time of my apartment in Ottawa; bicycling from the Byward Market in Ottawa out to Mooney’s Bay along the Rideau Canal bike paths (I don’t think I had done that since I was about 15 years old—but I had no difficulty at all!); seeing friends up in the Gatineau Park; and yesterday visiting for the first time Amherst Island in Lake Ontario. For the past week, my house-guest has been the teenage daughter of my record producer in Germany (see us both in the photo taken on Parliament Hill in Ottawa) whom I have known since she was 3 years old. Canada for sure is a great place in the summer! Tomorrow I will go to the cottage near Perth, Ontario where I used to go with my grandparents when I was a child (my aunt still has it), so that will be another trip down Memory Lane. Soon I have to stop being social, however, and retreat into seclusion to do some very serious study. So please don’t expect to hear or see much of me after my masterclasses in Perugia later this month. For my break to be totally successful, I need time to myself, and am determined to take advantage of that before going back to my non-stop concertizing around the world. So forgive me if I promised to visit you but am not going to make it. It seems I can’t do everything, even when my schedule is “empty”.

I just finished inserting on the schedule page of this website my engagements for the 2010-2011 concert season (please click on the event to see all details). Just about all of them are there. A few recitals are still a bit vague, and I have not, as usual, listed my recording sessions. This season those include a first disc of Mozart Piano Concertos (beginning with the early ones) with the Orchestra da Camera di Mantova (to be recorded in early December); and a solo Fauré disc in January (what wonderful music--it will include the Ballade in the original version; his Theme et Variations; 2 Valses-Caprice and 3 Nocturnes). There are more exciting recordings to come later in 2011. Some concert highlights include a tour with the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie which takes me to several venues in which I have never played (Frankfurt's Alte Oper and the Berlin Konzerthaus); benefit recitals in Atlanta (for the centre for ovarian cancer research at Georgia Tech), Ottawa (for the Bruyere Hospital) and Saskatoon (for WaterCan who funds clean water projects in Africa); orchestral appearances in Oslo, Birmingham, Rotterdam, Ottawa, Berlin, and both the Festival Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. I will be a lot at my "home" venue of Wigmore Hall--three times in fact, beginning in November. If the number of concerts doesn't look that enormous, then the repertoire is for sure. Frightening, in fact. That is why I am practising hard at the moment, to avoid a nervous breakdown when my season starts at the end of September (wasn't it Mozart who wrote to his father that he was too busy giving concerts to practise?!). Six new commissions for November...three of which are still being type-set. Each piece takes so much time (even a "simple" Three-Part Invention of Bach!). Besides old and new pieces, I have several which I played a few times many years ago, but which require re-working almost from scratch: the Brahms-Handel Variations, the Schumann Introduction and Allegro appassionata, Op. 92, Liszt's 1st Concerto. And so the list goes on (in my "spare" time I will start learning Messiaen's monumental Turangalila which comes up immediately in September 2011..). But I look forward to it all and meeting many of you along the way!

Except for a few Bach Three-Part Inventions, and reading through some Liszt Songs, I haven't played the piano for ten days. I'm starting to miss it. Instead I have done a massive clean-out of my London flat which was beginning to suffocate me. Returning home from tours for only 2-3 days at a time meant that for years papers were just thrown in boxes waiting to be sorted; junk accumulated; cardboard boxes, mostly from Hyperion, were stashed in corners; posters and programme books from my Bach World Tour; old suitcases, and a million other things. Today with two friends I made a trip to the Camden Recycling Centre, and tomorrow will make another. The worst is done and I can now enjoy living here again. What memories, however, have been resuscitated! Old photos that I had completely forgotten about (the one shown here was taken in 1986 during the session for my Granados CD on CBC Records); letters; fan mail; not to mention concert programmes. I have filled several suitcases with stuff for the National Archives in Canada who will gladly take anything I give them. I pity the person who has to sort it all out. If ever I want to write my autobiography, I can go there myself to do some research. No room to store it here. It does all make me think of what I’ve done in my life so far (a hell of a lot), and what I want to do with the remaining years—hopefully many decades yet of performing. Over the next few months I have to take some important decisions about repertoire, recordings and future projects. Already on my schedule page of this website I have filled in some of the concerts I have between the end of September and Christmas, but there is a lot more to come. Another task I have is finally, after almost ten years, to write down the three Bach arrangements on my Arrangements CD which people have been clamouring for ever since it was released in 2001. Boosey & Hawkes will be publishing them in November along with six new pieces that have been written for me by contemporary composers. If I don’t get that done by next week I’m sunk. I only ever had them in my head and am finding it surprisingly difficult to write down every inflection. I also did a massive clean-out of my body in order to have some medical tests done—which I passed with flying colours. The sedation was so quick and lovely. If only camomile tea would have the same effect!

The third CD in my series of Beethoven Sonata recordings has now been released. It is available for purchase through my online shop (click on the link to the left of this page). That's the one I recorded last fall which includes four sonatas: the Op. 26 (with the funeral march), Op. 10 No. 2 in F major; Op. 90, and the "Moonlight". If you order it in the next 10 days, I'll be happy to sign it for you! To watch a short video about its production, please go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYukzPF3Yc8

For those of you suffering from the fact that I'm not performing again until the end of September, you can be somewhat consoled by listening to a two-hour programme I recorded last spring for CBC Radio entitled "This Is My Music". Throughout I speak about my life and illustrate it with certain recordings--some of which will be suprises for sure! I haven't listened to the finished product yet myself.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/programs/thisismymusic/audio.html

If I don’t write tonight, many of you will wonder what has happened to me (already I am getting mails to that effect). I simply needed time to function again after the immense effort of the last week. But what a joy it has all been! The sixth Trasimeno Music Festival was really the best yet, and will be hard to equal in the future. We had fantastic audiences all week, both in quality and numbers. Their silence throughout the concerts was truly remarkable and was commented on by the musicians. They had come to listen and weren’t going to miss any of it. We had people from all over the world—Canada, USA (including a group from Spivey Hall, Atlanta), Australia, the UK, Japan, Hungary, Germany, Denmark, France, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and more Italians than ever before which pleased me. My fellow artists were all fantastic, and I was so happy not only performing along with them, but listening to them from the audience. The cellist Pieter Wispelwey (with me in the photo) performed in four of the seven concerts, playing Bach, Schubert, Haydn, and Chopin (his Chopin Sonata was to me a thing of great beauty and made all the long hours learning it worthwhile). The Quartetto di Cremona, virtually the only string quartet in the country that is making a name for themselves outside of Italy, outdid themselves in two concerts, with an especially beautiful “Death and the Maiden” Quartet by Schubert. Soprano Ilona Domnich gave a charming rendition of some Chopin songs in the final evening (no rain at all this year, so we were able to enjoy the magic of the courtyard of the Castle of the Knights of Malta for all the chamber concerts). Conductor Hannu Lintu galvanized the Orchestra da Camera di Mantova in a performance of Beethoven’s Second Symphony that I, for one, will long remember. It combined terrific energy and passion with a beautiful elegance in the Larghetto. If our work together on Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto is an indication of how easy it is to combine our musical personalities, then the many engagements we have together over the next few years will all be highlights for me. In Gubbio I conducted the orchestra, led by the indefatigable Carlo Fabiano, myself in two Mozart Concertos, not an easy thing to do with a “real” conductor sitting in the audience. They are excellent musicians who come from all over Italy (including the first oboist from La Scala). Our literary guest was Vikram Seth, interviewed (as was Ian McEwan last year) by Canadian broadcaster Eric Friesen. I regret that I didn’t have time at home to accompany him in some Schubert songs as he had requested. Every minute of my time was taken up, and I hardly slept all week. Rehearsals, concerts, meeting fans, running a restaurant at home for the musicians (11 for lunch; six for dinner)….there was scarcely a moment to breathe. But half the fun of such a festival is spending time with my colleagues and meeting the public. I must thank my whole staff and personal assistants who also outdid themselves this year. There are only a few of us, but each one is essential and without them nothing would happen. I haven’t given a thought to next year’s programme yet. First I have to see the results of this year. But fingers crossed that we can go on and have another exceptional week of music in this most beautiful part of Italy. And a huge thank you to all who donated to become a Friend of the festival. Your support made it possible.

My first international week-long masterclass will be held in Perugia, Italy this summer from August 17-23. It is a presentation of the Associazione Trasimeno Music Festival and will be held in the Auditorium Marianum in the heart of the city. To read more about it, please download the attached information and application form. It is open to advanced students between the ages of 18 and 30. I will be accepting a maximum of ten students, but the whole course is open to auditors who want to come for the week or just for a day or two. The course will be given in English. For more information, please contact us on masterclasses@trasimenomusicfestival.com

If you want an easy life, don’t run a music festival. And certainly don’t become a concert pianist—even one supposedly on a “mini-sabbatical”. I have spent the greater part of the past two days (and of course hours and hours before that) on the computer at the printers here in Italy finalizing the printed programme for the Trasimeno Music Festival which starts in no time at all now—on the 26th. The work (and often frustration) involved is immense. Content (everything in two languages which is a nightmare), layout, proof-reading…even with help from everyone involved this is a killer. But it’s done and I hope people will appreciate it. What makes me very happy is to see the entire page of donor’s names—so many more than we have ever had. Thank you again to all of you who became Friends of the festival this year! Without your support, we simply couldn’t continue. In the middle of all of that, I am practising the six programmes I have to play in a week. This is nothing but pleasure, and especially this year when I am playing so many of my very favourite pieces. Beethoven 4, 2 Mozart Concertos, Schumann solo works….and the Franck Quintet which I rehearsed last weekend in Genova. The Quartetto di Cremona lives there, and so I flew from London in order to get a head start with our preparations. They are great guys and play with enormous enthusiasm. I was amazed when they took me to the home of the widow of Mieczysław Horszowski, the famous Polish pianist who died in 1993, a month before his 101th birthday (teacher of Perahia among others). She was so kind and even turned my pages (see photo).

Before I left London, not only did I write the liner notes for my new Schumann CD out in November, but I was at the Canadian High Commission for a special event hosted by our High Commissioner, James Wright and his wife Donna. You can see who was there by clicking on the link below. They asked me to be part of the “welcoming” group at the door of the residence on Grosvenor Square, along with, among others, the author Kate Pullinger (winner of the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction). Later on, along with Galen and Hilary Weston, I joined Her Majesty and her husband for a short conversation in which the topic of conversation was her upcoming speech to the United Nations. It will be interesting to hear it after what she said!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXjPkVD79tw&feature=player_embedded