Throughout most of the piano’s history, women pianists lacked access to formal training and were excluded from male-dominated performance spaces. Even the modern piano’s keys were designed without consideration of women’s typically smaller hands. Yet despite their music being largely confined to the domestic sphere, women continued to play, perform, and compose on their own terms.

Celebrated pianist and author Susan Tomes traces fifty such women across the piano’s history. Including now-famous names such as Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, Tomes also highlights overlooked women: from Hélène de Montgeroult, whose playing saved her life during the French Revolution, to Leopoldine Wittgenstein, influential Viennese salonnière, and Hazel Scott, the first Black performer in the United States to have a nationally syndicated TV show.

From Maria Szymanowska to Nina Simone, and including interviews with women performing today, this is a much-needed corrective to our understanding of the piano-and a timely testament to women’s musical lives.

Throughout most of the piano’s history, women pianists lacked access to formal training and were excluded from male-dominated performance spaces. Even the modern piano’s keys were designed without consideration of women’s typically smaller hands. Yet despite their music being largely confined to the domestic sphere, women continued to play, perform, and compose on their own terms.

Celebrated pianist and author Susan Tomes traces fifty such women across the piano’s history. Including now-famous names such as Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, Tomes also highlights overlooked women: from Hélène de Montgeroult, whose playing saved her life during the French Revolution, to Leopoldine Wittgenstein, influential Viennese salonnière, and Hazel Scott, the first Black performer in the United States to have a nationally syndicated TV show.

From Maria Szymanowska to Nina Simone, and including interviews with women performing today, this is a much-needed corrective to our understanding of the piano-and a timely testament to women’s musical lives.

Ever since Alfred Brendel bid farewell to the concert stage after six decades of performing, he has been passing on his insight and experience in the form of lectures, readings and master-classes. This reader for lovers of the piano distils his musical and linguistic eloquence and vast knowledge, and will prove invaluable to anyone with an interest in the technique, history and repertoire of the piano.

Erudite, witty, enlightening and deeply personal, A Pianist’s A to Z is the ideal book for all piano lovers, musicians and music aficionados: rarely has the instrument been described in such an entertaining and intelligent fashion.

‘Richly absorbing… An impressive exploration of Siberia’s terrifying past.’ Guardian
‘Evocative and wonderfully original.’ Colin Thubron
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Siberia’s expansive history is traditionally one of exiles, bitter cold and suffering. Yet there is another tale to tell.

Dotted throughout this remote and beautiful landscape are pianos created during the boom years of the nineteenth century. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood. How these pianos made the journey into this snow-bound wilderness in the first place is remarkable. That they might be capable of making music in such a hostile landscape feels like a miracle.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia is an absorbing story about a piano hunt – a quixotic quest through two centuries of Russian history and eight time zones stretching across an eleventh of the world’s land surface. It reveals not only an unexpected musical legacy, but profound and brave humanity in the last place on earth you might expect to find it.
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What readers are saying about The Lost Pianos of Siberia:

***** ‘You know a book’s good when, on finishing it, you just want to start again.’
***** ‘Beautifully written, full of compelling anecdotes celebrating Siberia’s extraordinary history.’
***** ‘The most unusual and intelligent way to tell a travel story.’

‘A rich, endlessly fascinating book.’ Philip Pullman

‘One pleasure after another.’ Gramophone

‘The delightful musings of a wise and worldly polymath.’ Financial Times, Books of the Year

Stephen Hough is indisputably one of the world’s leading pianists, winning global acclaim and numerous awards for his concerts and recordings, as well as being a writer and composer.

In Rough Ideas, Hough writes about music and the life of a musician, from exploring the broader aspects of what it is to walk out onto a stage or to make a recording, to specialist tips from deep inside the practice room. He also writes vividly about people, places, literature and art, and touches on more controversial subjects, such as the possibility of the existence of God, and the challenge involved in being a gay Catholic. Rough Ideas is an illuminating and absorbing introduction into the life and mind of one of our great cultural figures.