Today’s Independent has my review of Eric Siblin’s book, ‘The Cello Suites’. Siblin, a former pop critic, describes how he fell in love unexpectedly with Bach’s cello music and set himself to find out all he could about the composer, and  about cellist Pablo Casals, the first person to bring the Bach cello suites to a wider public in the 20th century. Click here to read the review.

A nice surprise today: Bob came back from a meeting with a magazine page brought along by a colleague. It was from the February issue of the leading French record magazine Diapason, one of whose editors had taken the new Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music as the subject of his editorial. The Cambridge Companion, an expert anthology of chapters by historians and musicologists, also contains a number of short ‘personal takes’  by people with practical experience of the recording industry, and there’s one by me about my own experience of making records. To my surprise, this article was the focus of Diapason’s editorial. There was a photo of me and several paragraphs of my article translated into French. ‘Her text is an open door onto a work which gives us all the material for proper reflection on what nourishes our passion for recordings.’

not too cold for some

The winter sun was striking low over the lake as I raised my tiny idiot-proof camera to take a picture of a terrier plunging into the icy water. (I mean that my camera is tiny and idiot-proof, not that it’s proof against tiny idiots, though of course that would be a useful specialist feature.)

A deep voice at my side said smugly, ‘I don’t think you’ll be able to point into the sun like that with the camera you have there.’ I turned to see a man carrying a camera about the size of a microwave oven. He proceeded to show me that with his superior camera he could do this, that and the other which would enable him – unlike me – to take a photograph facing straight into the winter sun. He was wearing a big show-off hat, so I ignored his advice. Always distrust a photographer in a big hat, I say.