I started my day with Handel's violin sonata

No I didn't. I started my day with a cycle-ride to ScrewFix to return an unused angle grinder blade. Then a kind friend gave me and 11 large, and many smaller, lumps of unwanted concrete a lift to the dump and a kind stranger helped me fling them into the skip.

Then I properly started my day.

Back at the Chamber Music Festival (in a curious new recital hall that looks a bit like a stone and metal gingerbread house - more informed commentary here) I listened to Handel. Then Vaughan Williams. Then Rebecca Clarke's Viola Sonata. Ever heard of her? I hadn't.

She entered this viola sonata in a 1919 competition sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Out of 72 entrants, Clarke's sonata tied for first place with a composition by Ernest Bloch but Coolidge used her casting vote for Bloch. People speculated that 'Rebecca Clarke' was a pseudonym as it was impossible for a woman to write such a beautiful work. Two years later Clarke's piano trio made an impressive showing in the same competition and her music was performed at concerts and festivals. She faded into obscurity until fairly recently but this sonata is now performed more often than Brahms's viola sonata. Today it was beautifully played by Marc Sabbah, but once again I found the music out of balance in the louder parts, with Polina Leschenko dominating on the piano (as yesterday evening).

My mum arrived this afternoon and came with me to this evening's concert. Utterly superb, and the first 45 minutes was among my very best experiences of live music. O/Modernt, (who I heard at this festival in 2017, and who say, among other very interesting things, 'Music is never old or new… it only exists in the moment of its sounding.') can make their instruments do the impossible. I've experienced audible silence before but instruments played so very, very quietly that you almost have to make your heart stop to hear them - all of them, all at once, all 16, 17, 18, 20 of them - only at O/Modernt's concert here in 2017. (See also here.) They didn't break between Purcell's Overture in G minor and one of Finzi's five Bagatelles. Music created 250 years apart fitted. They then didn't break between Finzi and an arrangement of Celtic traditional music. Again, seamless. Then back/forward to Purcell's Cold Song by which time I was in tears. They are led by violinist Hugo Ticciati who is a magician.

Vaughan Williams's Lark Ascending was played very beautifully by the violinist who moved around too much yesterday.

Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridges included songs by Radiohead, Sting and Pink Floyd. 'Invent the past. Revise the future. Live the now.'  (John Cage, quoted by O/Modernt).