Here are a couple of reviews of  the Florestan Trio’s Beethoven trio concerts in the Wigmore Hall this week. The series came to a memorable close on 13 January with a standing ovation from the Wigmore audience.

The Independent five-star review of the first concert

The Guardian review of the first concert

The Guardian five-star review of the second concert

I was hoping to post reviews of the third and final concert on 13 January, but to my surprise there don’t seem to have been any. If you know of any reviews, please drop me a line to susan@susantomes.com

On the day after the first of the Florestan Trio’s Beethoven Cycle concerts in the Wigmore Hall on Friday, a kind member of the audience invited me to lunch in Le Caprice, a lovely restaurant to which I had never been before. The bread basket on our table contained a a very superior freshly-baked carrot muffin which, however, nobody could face eating at the start of a meal. It was still sitting plumply in the bread basket at the end of the meal when we were too full to eat another thing, but I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving it there, so I asked I could take it away with me.

Our waiter glided away and came back with two more carrot muffins which he said would ‘make up a nice number for the family’. He took the three muffins away to pack them up. When it was time to leave, however, I had forgotten all about them. We left the restaurant and had walked a block away when we heard running footsteps behind us, and there was our beaming waiter in his stripey apron, pursuing us with a beautifully-packed blue bag of muffins. Talk about looking after your customers!

Over New Year I have been corresponding quite a bit with pianist Noriko Ogawa, who has almost finished translating my book ‘Out of Silence’ into Japanese. Though I am really looking forward to the Japanese edition, due out in spring, I am rather sorry that the stream of interesting questions from Noriko will now dry up. I have never worked closely with a translator before and, though I realise she has spared me as many questions as she can, I have found it delightful and thought-provoking to be quizzed about my ‘meaning’ by someone from a different culture.

While she was working on the translation this week, Noriko sent me this charming photo of her little black cat watching over her, with Japanese New Year decorations in the background. You can see my book on the floor, as well as Noriko’s dictionaries and the notebook in which she writes her translations longhand.

On the last day of the year, I find myself pondering the things that gave me most satisfaction during 2011. To my surprise, I realise that some of my happiest working moments were to do with teaching masterclasses. I say ‘to my surprise’ because I fended off teaching for a long while, thinking it was not for me. Not because I wasn’t interested, but because I didn’t believe I could ever live up to some of the examples I had when I was a student myself. In particular, the piano guru György Sebök set a standard which terrified me for ages afterwards. (There are some wonderful YouTube clips of Sebök teaching, which show his skill with words.) Whenever I was asked to teach, I always thought, ‘What’s the point? He could say it so much better.’

Gradually, however, as I acquired more and more performing experience, there came a point when I couldn’t help realising that I did actually know a lot more about certain pieces than my students did. I also discovered how to put certain things into words, or more to the point, I gained the confidence to say them. I’m still inspired by  Sebök’s dazzling powers of observation, but in the meantime I’ve also found that young musicians’ hunger for new ideas can be inspiring in itself.

So I’d like to thank everyone who took the trouble to get in touch over Christmas and say that they’d enjoyed working with me. I enjoyed it too. A very Happy New Year!

One of our Christmas presents this year was Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet, a wonderful new book of baking recipes – breads, cakes, pies, desserts. The word ‘short’ presumably refers to pastry and not to the book itself, which is notably long (and sweet).

My eye fell almost at once on the cheesecake recipes. I often try to make cheesecake, using various recipes, but am rarely satisfied with the results. I’ve never really managed to replicate the first cheesecake I ever loved, sold at the cheese stall in Cambridge market in my student days. Immoderate consumption thereof was probably one reason why I put on so much weight in my first student year.

Anyway, on Boxing Day I thought I’d have a go at Dan Lepard’s recipe for East End Cheesecake, the closest he says he could get to the famous variety sold by Grodzinski’s bakery. My cheesecake looked lovely on a sky-blue plate at a dinner that evening. Before I had tried it myself, a couple of my guests tasted theirs and suddenly cut across the conversation with glad cries of, ‘Wow! This is gorgeous.’ It was, too. The ingredients were not so different from other cheesecakes I’ve made, but there were a couple of innovations in the method, notably the instruction to boil cream and butter, and to pour this boiling liquid onto the cream cheese before mixing. That slightly caramelised cream-and-butter combo gave a delectable fillip to the taste, evoking a high-class Middle European Konditorei rather than a suburban kitchen. So Dan Lepard’s ‘East End’ recipe is my new favourite.