I’m off to Vienna to rehearse four programmes of Mozart’s music which violinist Erich Höbarth and I are playing this season in Perth Concert Hall, Scotland’s newest concert hall (our first concert is on November 11). We’re tackling twelve of Mozart’s sonatas for piano and violin.

Piano and violin, I hear you say? Isn’t it ‘violin and piano’? Well, not according to Mozart who called them ‘sonatas for piano and violin’. In his letters, he mentions playing the piano parts himself ‘with the accompaniment of a violin’. That was how they were perceived until the nineteenth century and the age of the celebrity violinist, when things flipped around. These works, and many others like them, started to be listed as ‘violin sonatas’, and the piano part was suddenly ‘the accompaniment’. Even today the violinist is often the one with their photo on the record cover, the one whose name is in bigger font in the programme, or the only one whose name is mentioned at the end of the radio broadcast.

Why does this matter? It matters because the re-labelling tricks people into perceiving things falsely. They expect the violin part to be the leading voice, when in fact the meat of the musical narrative is in the piano part. If you approach these works expecting the violin part to be pre-eminent, you experience a kind of cognitive dissonance as you listen: often the violin is doing something quite modest, and you sense that the piano part is full of interest and information, but you don’t understand why such prominent material should be relegated to ‘the accompaniment’. The answer is that it isn’t an accompaniment. If you switch to hearing the music as piano with violin, everything falls into place. Of course you still need an excellent violinist, and perhaps even more importantly, an excellent musician, both of which I’m fortunate to have.

With more historical awareness, and with the intervention of a few strong-minded pianists, things are beginning to move back to Mozart’s original concept of ‘sonatas for piano with violin’. If you look up all the available recordings on Spotify, you’ll find about half of the duo sonatas advertised with the pianist’s name first, the other half with the violinist’s name first. This shows the confusion around the topic. It’s clearly a situation in transition, but at least there is movement.

To a talk at the Guildhall School of Music about musicians’ injuries. ‘Suffering for their Art’, presented by Helen Reid, explored the complex topic of how performers deal with injuries which prevent them from playing their instruments. It seems that musicians are notoriously reluctant to speak openly about their injuries. Playing is so bound up with identity that injured musicians find themselves going through a cycle of emotions very similar to that of bereavement: denial, anger, grief, acceptance.

It was suggested by the panel of experts that classical musicians are more inhibited than other musicians about admitting to their injuries. This is probably in proportion to the length of time classical musicians have been practising their instrument (often since childhood) and planning their future as performers.

Those who had suffered injuries while at college had ‘negative recollections’ of the help offered. The lack of help is a hard thing to quantify, given that sufferers find it hard to admit to their problems in the first place. But there were some very sad stories of students finding that their teachers had nothing helpful to suggest, or were even alienated by the suffering student before them. The situation is improving, but slowly and patchily.

On the positive side, those who had recovered from an injury often felt that the enforced break had helped them to gain perspective, and to ‘let go’ and enjoy music more when they resumed playing. Breaking the obsessive pattern of practising and being forced to find other goals in life, even for a short while, had long-term benefits. Years later, some musicians were even able to say that the injury ‘turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me’. This is not guaranteed, alas, especially if the sufferer has to abandon thoughts of a career in music.

I learned one thing I didn’t know before: that the British Association for Performing Arts Medicine runs free clinics in a number of UK cities for musicians with playing-related problems. (You can book an appointment through their website.) Much of the treatment is free, and in more complicated cases, BAPAM can refer people to specialist help whose cost is often greatly reduced for musicians. I wish I had known this earlier – but at least I know it now.

In the wake of the Trondheim competition, I’ve been thinking about the gap between the jury’s taste and the public’s taste in performers. Several times during the competition I happened to bump into members of the public in the coffee shop, or in the foyers of the concert hall, and got chatting to them about their favourite players in the competition. I couldn’t tell them what I thought, of course, but I allowed myself to ask them for their views.

I was repeatedly struck by the fact that their selection was never the same as the jury’s. It’s probably simplistic to say so, but I often felt the public’s approval tended to fall on groups with a very showy platform manner, groups who had taken great trouble over their appearance, or groups which happened to feature a particularly good-looking person. The jury was not immune to those factors, naturally, but they came lower down our list of priorities. Maybe I just happened upon an un-representative selection of audience members, but I became conscious of their disappointment when certain groups didn’t do as well as they had expected. There was no forum in which the jury could explain what they were listening for and why – the audience just had to accept our decisions, as the competitors did. But I was a little sad that we and the audience didn’t always see eye to eye on those decisions. For one thing, I’d like to think that the jury is identifying a new generation of musicians whom the public will love and appreciate.

Yesterday on the flight home from Norway, our flight crew announced that the airline had just installed free WiFi on certain planes, including ours. As I had a laptop with me I was able to send my first e-mail from the sky. Even more amazingly, a reply pinged straight back from my astonished family, who are used to me being un-contactable while I’m on planes. I felt very 21st-century!

The Trondheim International Chamber Competition finished on Sunday with the Trio Paul Klee, from Paris, as the winners of the first prize. The London-based Fournier Trio (see photo) won the second prize and the Audience Prize, which will bring them back to Trondheim next year for a series of concerts. Third prize went to the Atanassov Trio, also from Paris. All three groups had tremendous qualities, and look set for fine careers.

Curiously enough the Final Round, at least in my view, was less impressive than the earlier rounds. All the participants had to play either Schubert’s B flat Trio or Beethoven’s Archduke, and it suddenly seemed as if they all felt they were little people walking around in giant’s shoes. This is, I think, a tribute to the sheer grandeur of those pieces of music. However, despite the Final not being quite as satisfying as I had hoped, the standard of playing overall was very high. I will treasure in particular the memory of the second round, in which the Atanassov Trio and the Fournier Trio played Schumann no 2 so beautifully, and the Trio Paul Klee were so wonderfully attuned to Brahms.

It’s hard to imagine getting blasé about smoked salmon, but I have nearly managed it here in Trondheim. At the hotel’s generous breakfast buffet there’s a special stand, known to us musicians as ‘the salmon station’, where you can get smoked and cured salmon of majestic quality. The salmon chef, or salmonster, if I could call him that, cures it himself to his own recipe. With some mustard sauce, home-made rye crispbread and a spoonful of scrambled egg, it’s a breakfast dish which has people closing their eyes in pleasure.

Fresh salmon tends to be on the menu of most other meals here as well, so we have almost overdosed on salmon in its various guises. It seems that this is a well-known problem historically. One of my Norwegian colleagues was telling me that in the old days in some parts of Norway, labourers would often have it written into their contracts that they were not to be fed salmon more than four times a week.