In my work as a classical performer, nothing beats the feeling of playing to a sold-out Wigmore Hall, with people standing at the back. That was my trio’s fortunate experience in London last night. I had invited a friend who doesn’t often go to concerts of this type. She was very struck by the audience’s intense concentration. Indeed, during quiet passages the hall was so silent that from the piano (I don’t face the audience when I play) it was possible to imagine nobody was there at all. It almost gives one a start when 550 people suddenly cough and rustle things at the end of a movement. 

Closing our programme was the famous piano trio by Shostakovich, rightly described in the notes as ‘chilling and harrowing’. There’s a lot of very anguished, almost brutal music in this work and it demands some powerful physical involvement from the players. Last night, when I finished playing the fast and violent second movement, I paused for a few seconds and then, as always happens at this moment in performances of this work, my heart started to thump madly. I’m not aware of it while I play – it seems to happen when there is a moment of rest. When your heart thumps like that, your vision is slightly disturbed and your hands shake slightly too. And the next thing I had to do was to begin the very slow lament which follows. I had only a few moments to compose myself, and I sat there trying to breathe deeply in the hope of quietening my thumping heart enough that I could set the right kind of mood in the slow movement. I often wonder if composers ever know about or consider the physical effects of their music on the people playing it!

A few days ago I wrote about our cat dragging her water bowl around the kitchen floor. It’s a topic I never thought I would mention again.

However, last night when we were giving the cat a bit of supper, we suddenly noticed that her pottery drinking bowl had gone. It was simply not there. We’re used to finding it in funny places, so we looked all around the kitchen and then out into the hall. I wondered if perhaps I had absent-mindedly picked up the bowl earlier that day, intending to replenish it, and put it down somewhere silly. So I looked in the other rooms, and then I looked outside. I even looked in the tool cupboard and in the fridge, because in times of stress I have been known to put frozen peas in the tool cupboard and spanners in the fridge. But there was no sign of the bowl. For a mad moment I wondered if one of our local foxes had wandered in while the back door was open and pinched the bowl for his china collection.

The cat looked innocently up at me as I opened and shut cupboard doors. Bob says that in one of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories, Holmes says that when you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever is left, however improbable, must hold the key to the explanation. I don’t know if we have eliminated the impossible yet, but we certainly explored the possible. So what’s left? Has the cat managed to drag her bowl into another dimension?

If anyone would like to hear the Florestan Trio playing live on radio and chatting about its Wigmore Hall concerts this week, we’ll be on BBC Radio 3’s drive-time programme, In Tune, this evening between about 6.15-6.45pm. We’ll be playing Beethoven, Shostakovich and Haydn and talking to presenter Sean Rafferty. You can also listen via the BBC website, or to a podcast, via http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/intune/.

The trio will be playing a concert at London’s Wigmore Hall tomorrow, 6 May, at 7.30pm. The concert is sold out, so only returns may be available.