Jessica Duchen's Blog

Last Saturday night, I left the Royal Albert Hall after the debut Prom of the Sinfonia of London and started down the slippery slope to South Kensington tube station. Moments later I stopped, because I'd realised I was, rather uncharacteristically, shaking all over. 

What induced this state was an extraordinary concert by an orchestra that hasn’t performed for more than 60 years, reconvened and conducted by John Wilson. Their programme was of works that can thrill and terrify in equal measure: Jo...

If you've been following JDCMB in the past, you'll know I've been blogging for a long time. 17 years. The climate back in 2004 was very different. All this online stuff was new, thrilling and full of hope. I was still in my thirties and didn't seem to have anything to lose, so I just bounced into the Wild West that was the Internet and found it was fun.

This past pandemic time hasn't been easy for anybody, of course, but it does focus the mind a little. I am doing many more different things now t...

The Australian Festival of Chamber Music gets into gear...Photo: Andrew Rankin

The pandemic is reaching the point at which we almost don’t dare to plan ahead at all, for fear of hopes being dashed yet again. If you are the director of an international festival, though, you can’t really afford to think like that. You have to hope and plan for the best, while also being prepared for the worst, doing all you can to anticipate likely troubles and short-circuit them before they happen. The Australian ...

When Immortal was published last October, I made a playlist to go with it on Apple Music. This was originally intended for the subscribers to the novel. As they've now had exclusive access to it for quite a few months, I'm happy to open it up to interested readers. It's a substantial quantity of music, lined up in the order you'll need it. Below is a list of which pieces go with which chapter. Hope you enjoy it.

The pieces are by Beethoven, unless otherwise indicated: I have included pertinent wo...

We are extremely grateful to the brilliant team of Putney Music, the long-running and much-loved local organisation that presents interviews with the great and good of the music world and who this week decided Tom and I might be a fun double-act addition to the roster. 

As the events can't be held in the usual way with stage and live audience, it's all gone online. Andrew Neill (not to be confused with Andrew Neil) asked the questions over Zoom and we responded, aided and abetted by Ricki the cat...

Yesterday I had my first Covid-19 vaccination. Everyone said I’d feel odd afterwards, perhaps with a headache and exhaustion, but I was absolutely fine. 

Early this morning, my husband and I were at the breakfast table having coffee and I went to pour myself a bowl of fruity muesli. Our preferred fruity muesli is sold in plastic bags, so to stop spillages we decant it into a Tupperware box, which was on the other side of the kitchen. As this box was nearly empty, from a cupboard containing severa...

We weren't planning to spill the beans about this project so soon, but it has just been shortlisted for an exciting development prize, the Fedora Award in Education, so it's time to say something.

You might remember Silver Birch, the so-called People's Opera that Roxanna Panufnik and I wrote for Garsington Opera a few years back. A People's Opera is a community project plus much more, designed to appeal to all ages, include professionals and amateurs alike and offer an artistically memorable expe...

Moved beyond measure by President Biden's inaugural ceremony yesterday, I've entered the last lines of Amanda Gorman's poem The Hill That We Climb into my "commonplace book".

"When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we're brave enough to see it. If only we're brave enough to be it."

I've kept a so-called commonplace book since 1986, when my sister gave me a sleek blank notebook with thin ivory-light pages a...

Yesterday in the UK 1,564 people lost their lives to Covid-19. Against the horror of mass death and a health service teetering on the brink of collapse, it feels wrong to mourn the passing of a small (if quite large at the time) musical dream. Still, put together with the prospects for British musicians post-Brexit, the news that Sir Simon Rattle is leaving the sinking ship couldn't feel much more emblematic if it tried. That ship is not the LSO, but the UK.

I don't doubt that no conductor in the...

What did we do in 2020? The world did a pandemic. The UK did Brexit. I did Beethoven. 

I finished writing a book about Beethoven. I wrote a bunch of articles about Beethoven and I wrote a bunch of articles about writing a book about Beethoven. I made a video with a musician, the fabulous Mishka Rushdie Momen, at the Wigmore Hall where I read from my book about Beethoven and she played some Beethoven on the piano. I played some Beethoven on the piano - I learned Op. 31 No. 3 and the 'Waldstein' an...