Chetham's Piano Summer School

Sam has always been very content in his one square mile around home. As long as he has his friends, his piano and his PlayStation, he’s happy. He goes to our local school, where his love of piano makes him the proverbial big fish in a small pond. His teachers roll him out for every event. At open evenings, he’s there in the hall, providing an impressive backdrop of Mozart and Beethoven while prospective parents drink coffee with the headteachers. It’s great for his confidence, but he doesn’t have any friends at school who share his passion. He made these friends when he went to Chetham’s. The chance to forge lasting friendships has been one of the best things about his two summers there. Outside of lessons and practice, there’s plenty of time to relax in the atrium with a drink and snack and get chatting to other young pianists and their parents. Every child is there because they love music, and this is something Sam really valued. After years of being the only person in his school who...

One of the many excellent things about CIPPS are the daily drop-in workshops. If you have a piece you want help with, you can go along to one of these workshops and some brilliant pianist will guide you on how to improve it.   I sat in these sessions as an observer and could see how helpful they were. Because I don’t play the piano myself, if I attempted to actually pinpoint the specifics, I would be making it all up, so I asked Sam for help. He told me not to even try talking about music, and has taken over the blog for today.   Hello, I’m Sam, and I have been going to Chetham’s International Piano Summer School for two years and love it. They have really good workshops like (my personal favourite) the drop-in practice workshop. These are great.  You can take a piece you’re struggling with  - maybe there’s a particular passage you can’t play as well as you want, or you need help keeping the melody louder than the base line. Whatever you need, you will be h...

The year between Sam’s first and second experiences of the summer school was a bit of a miserable one where the piano was concerned. This was mostly because of me. He’d never been interested in taking music exams, preferring to play pieces he loved. (After his first ever lesson learning notes A,B and C, he turned up at his piano teacher’s house, earnestly clutching a book of Mozart’s sonatas, and announced that he wanted to learn Number 15.) As a parent with absolutely no musical background whatsoever - the pinnacle of my musical life was playing  London’s Burning  on the recorder in a primary school assembly – I found it difficult to know the best way of supporting my son’s passion. After our first summer school, having chatted to lots of other parents, I came away with the idea that he should probably do grade five because it seemed like a key one.  He spent six months plodding to his lessons. He had three pieces he obediently learned but stopped practising in betw...

In August 2023, I went to my first ever Chetham’s International Piano Summer School. I am tragically musically illiterate but had a 10-year-old son obsessed with Mozart and Beethoven and not completely shabby at playing the piano, so we decided we’d give the summer school a go. I admit I was slightly under sufferance here. Being tragically musically illiterate meant my main role in my son’s piano education was to sit on the sofa while he played and occasionally look up and say, ‘That’s brilliant, darling,’ grateful his interests didn’t require me to stand on the edge of a football pitch cutting up oranges on a Sunday morning.   We arrived to an atmosphere of excited anticipation. The reception was filled with people – adults, children and faculty – checking in for their five-day stint at this world-renowned music school, all of them brought here by one thing: a lifelong love of the piano. It was impossible not to be at least slightly infected by this and later, as Sam and I walked ...