Many hands

This festival feels like a gathering of highly musical friends who have got together for a happy week of playing together and have kindly invited a few others of us to their party. The organisers are friendly and welcoming and ever since my name was ticked off a list on the first evening, I have been welcomed by name and with smiles at every concert.

One of the party, pianist Julius Drake, saw that the revered Russian/Austrian concert pianist, Elisabeth Leonskaja, would be playing Schubert at the Wigmore Hall in London this Sunday so asked her if she'd like to make a detour to Oxford and play Schubert's Sonata in C for four hands with him. Schubert doesn't fit the theme of this festival - 'these enchanted isles' - but hey, fun to hang out with a major concert pianist, no? She agreed and they played to about 180 of us. An extraordinarily intimate treat.

The only downside of this festival is that the concerts are mostly at mealtimes so our eating has become quite erratic. We tried earlier in the day to book a nearby pub table for this evening but the nearest pub was fully booked and the smaller one didn't serve food in the evening. We met Secondborn there in the hour between concerts and didn't have the gall to eat the picnic supper I'd packed. No matter - we'd eaten late after the lunchtime concert.

My favourite piece in the 8pm concert was the earliest of 400 years: John Bull's In Nomine IV, arranged for piano, clarinet and cello. The clarinetist at this party, Reto Bieri, has completely captivated me with his subtle playing. I wish these concerts were being recorded.

******

Between concerts I got news that my friend Elisabeth died this morning. Serious dementia has meant that for a while she's recognised no-one, so for her it is a liberation. For the rest of us: a time to acknowledge an ending and remember her kindness, her sense of fun, her intelligence, her irreverence, her fierce principles and her strong opinions. Our different first languages meant that our discussions about language and gender were always tripping over things the other hadn't considered and we were both the richer for that.