Chetham's Piano Summer School

I was going to write this blog in some kind of order: day one, day two, day three, etc. But now we're here, I'm going to devote this posts to the incredible teachers Sam has had here, Murray McLachlan and Paul Harris. It’s our third day, and Sam has just had his first ever lesson with Murray McLachlan. I don’t know if Murray is an actual legend in the piano and piano-teaching world, but I think he must be. If he’s not, then he should be. My own specialism in life is contemporary fiction, and I imagine a lesson with Murray for a pianist is like a lesson with Salman Rushdie for a writer, although I doubt any novelist could teach with the verve of a musician. (We’re too boring, and too lazy. It’s why we write, in silence, sentence by painstaking sentence.) We walked into the room and Murray was just looking over the notes I'd made on Sam's application form. I was expecting him to say something along the lines of, 'Hello, Sam. What do you like to play? Why don't you...

  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...