Musical performance is a fundamental part of human existence, yet even the most experienced performer, teacher or scholar can fail to appreciate what lies behind it. It is well known that a performance in public usually represents untold hours – indeed many years – of learning and preparation, but how interpretations are put together, on what basis and with what effect may be less widely understood. What makes some performances come across as ‘musical’? Should one try to honour the composer's intentions, and if so how can they be ascertained? What is the relation between the score, the musical work and the performances that they give rise to? How can practice sessions and rehearsals be made more effective, and how might performance anxiety best be overcome? Questions like these are often in the back of the performer's mind, not to mention the minds of their teachers, but until now it has been difficult to find compelling answers. For too long musicians have had to resort to tradition and intuition for the solutions, and important as those undeniably are, they are not always enough. The burgeoning academic literature on performance from recent years has offered little in the way of practical assistance: targeted at a highly specialised readership and generally written in somewhat impenetrable language, it has tended to neglect the concerns of performers themselves despite the need for clear and engaging writing on such topics as practice, memorisation, stage fright, analysing music for performance and the modern performer's historical ‘responsibilities’.