ReCollection: Kettle's Yard Oral History Archive

I was an undergraduate at King's College and it was then that I started going back to Kettle's Yard. As well as the evening concerts, there was a lunchtime series which was really run by students at Cambridge and which we'd used to get the chance to play. I remember the first time I went back there to play, I think it must have been in my first year at King's and I was asked to do a solo recital at Kettle's Yard. It was such a.... even at that stage, I remember feeling this real sense of attachment to the place and this kind of almost nostalgia going back there. That was a really special occasion and I played there maybe five or six times when I was at university there, both solo recitals and chamber music. And it just always... I always felt really happy playing there. There was something about the atmosphere and the way it made me feel that was conducive to making me feel really comfortable on stage there. Partly, I suppose, because it brought back those memories of childhood, before you know how to get nervous for a concert and things and, you know, then when you're older, you're very much more aware of what you're doing. But Kettle's Yard is like this sort of haven, still is really.

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There is something about spaces that lead you to think about music in a different way, I think, and certainly the light in Kettle's Yard does allow me to find more light in my playing and probably, maybe more subconsciously than in a conscious way, I suppose the art in the gallery, you know... sometimes I will be playing a Mozart passage and I'll look up and you'll see one of these sculptures or one of these paintings or just some seashells or something and... yeah, it does release something in me and there is an association but I can't say specifically what it is. But I think actually as a musician I'm quite a visual person so I do, when I'm playing works, I associate them with images in my mind and it's not always real images but I suppose I must... I think I take in more in terms of visual art than I am aware I do.

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To be honest, the tables and the fireplaces and the beams are as evocative to me as the sculptures, possibly more so, and the chairs, the chairs upstairs, and the other piano upstairs as well, just things like that, and even that toilet through at the back which you can't use, things like that. That is more indelibly printed on my mind probably than any one of the artworks although, actually, in a way probably if you took away some of the artworks or moved them round, I'd probably notice but I've just never... maybe because I went there from so young, I never really looked at it from the point of view of being a gallery and sort of looking at each object and sort of studying paintings. It was just the ambience. It's definitely a whole atmosphere for me and not that I don't love individual pieces but it's the way that they're arranged or in some cases I suppose the lack of obvious arrangement that's so charming. I'm sure it must have all been thought through but it seems, when you first go there, like there are things in places where you wouldn't expect to see them and that, I think, is particularly wonderful.

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