Group A leaving at 5.30am after the concert or group B leaving at 10.25 am. Which would you choose? B. Well done, that is the correct answer, after all, leaving Poland at that ungodly hour would render me incapable of being sprightly dad at half term. So Group B it is, a...
I am currently sitting in Warsaw Frederic Chopin International airport, which is closed because air traffic control is down. I wish they would pull themselves together and think happy thoughts as I'm feeling a little down myself now. I want to go home. We made our debut in...
Last night we were in Cologne, one of my favourite German cities, with its beautiful cathedral and fabulous concert hall where we get free beer after the performance - I think I've told you about that before. We played the Widmann violin concerto with Christian Tetzlaff - a...
I don't know what the French for joie de vivre is, but I left mine somewhere on the Barbican stage on Thursday night after Daphnis and Chloe. Well, really it was after a week which began 2 weeks earlier which had 2 performances of Daphnis, La Mer and a couple of concerti as...
I may have imagined it, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I slept in my own bed yesterday, or was it the day before? After the Prom where socks were blown off and Christine Pendrill astonished us all with her fabulous cor anglais playing, we all had a short time to turn...
I've never actually bought a brand new car, I mean one of those ones where the plastic is still on the seats and the odometer has the delivery mileage only. Being a financially challenged musician and father of 3, the newest car I have ever bought was a year old. It still had...
I think that Daytona Beach fell in love with Kristian Jarvi last night. Anyone who was at the concert we did with him in the Barbican a while ago will know what I'm talking about. The audience wasn't quite as full as other shows here-it was a conductor they weren't familiar with...
[gallery] After a very welcome day off where I personally did very little except move from pool to beach, the second free day saw a lot of us whizzing around at high speed. The organisers of the festival had very kindly organised for us to visit the Daytona NASCAR racing track....
After C.S. lewis decorated my back garden last week, Paris seems rather drab. We arrived yesterday to a grey and miserable city, cloaked in a wet blanket of cloud; despite the travel nightmare which was last week in London, I began to long for the crunchy snow again. Still we...
Although I am in Basingstoke today, I shall not be filling you in on backstage gossip as it isn't really a tour. However we travel to Paris on Monday with Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Visit the site for regular blogs. If you are suffering from blog addiction then you might be...
