St. John Brown

St. John BrownI became involved with Meridian FM in the middle of 2010. I saw the publicity when the station got its license in March 2010 and the small print said "if you would like to be involved, please get in touch." I did….. and somewhat surprisingly they didn’t reject me immediately.

I lived nearly all my early life and was at school in Kent. I went abroad in the 1980s and lived in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Netherlands for 16 years. We moved back as a family to the UK to East Grinstead in 1998 as two of our children went to Ashdown House school.

I was lucky enough to go to school at King’s Canterbury which had a fantastic music department. This was tied in with a father who had an idiosyncratic but genuine love for music – he thought Messiaen was a greater composer than Mozart. I learned the piano at school, but was very mediocre. I started playing again 5 years ago, and have attended a couple of the summer Piano schools at Chethams in Manchester – which are a real pleasure – you can practice, play, attend master classes and recitals, from 7am to 11pm.

I have a pretty good knowledge of classical music from Bach and Haydn to today. My particular love is the piano, but also love chamber music, orchestral, song, opera. My blind spots are the flute and guitar as solo instruments, and a lot of the music before Bach.