Chetham's Piano Summer School

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 ...