Chetham's Piano Summer School

  Here we are, back at Chetham’s for our third piano summer school. My son, Sam, is the musician of our family. I come along as his musically-illiterate mother to remind him to wear clean pants every morning. I’m by far the least knowledgeable parent here and my role in Sam’s piano life is confined to paying for his lessons and telling him he’s brilliant. He seems ok with this. We arrived on Monday and Sam was happy to reunite with friends he’d made on previous summer schools. We then spent a long time pacing the corridors and going into every room to find a Steinway grand for him to practice on. That achieved, he played happily for a few hours and I, not for the first time, wished he loved the sort of music I could read a book to. But there we are. He prefers Lizst and Rachmaninvov, neither of whom will let you do much else while they’re around. Later on in the afternoon was the first recital of the week by some of the summer school faculty. This was a gala recital – nine musician...

It's a difficult choice and not one we've had to make before. For the last couple of years, we've managed both. Our family holidays have never been extravagant. We're fans of grabbing an Interrail pass (free for under-12s!) and a tent and slogging round Europe, then following it with a week at Chetham's summer school for Sam and some kind of mildly sophisticated UK city break for our daughter, who is older.  This year and the foreseeable future is slightly different because my career as a university lecturer is in the throes of a crisis (as it is for many). We decided to take our family holiday at Easter because the price difference from August is actually unbelievable. Family holidays with teenagers can be difficult. They don't like each other for much of the time, they often don't like their parents, and my two found themselves stuck in a caravan for five days with no internet access and only family for company. Added to this was the fact that Sam missed t...

My son, Sam, has been to CIPSS for the last two summers, and loved it. He loves the lessons with the exceptional faculty; he loves meeting new friends who share his love of the piano; and he loves going to the lunchtime concerts, watching brilliant young musicians and daring to hope that maybe, one day, he could do something similar. Of course, there is often a discrepancy between dreams and reality. Apart from all the other reasons why performing on such a stage would have been out of reach for Sam at that time, he suffered massively from performance anxiety. He was ten years old, went to a small local school and didn't mind playing for his friends and teachers, but if you asked him to perform in front of a larger audience, he refused. He couldn't cope with the nerves and preferred to avoid it. Rome, as we all know, wasn't built in a day and neither is performance anxiety quickly overcome. However, it did began to change during his first summer school. Sam found the atmosp...

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...