Winter weather has suddenly arrived in London. There is ice on the smaller ponds frost on the bushes, and low winter sunshine striking dramatically through the trees.

This week Erich Hoebarth and I – me in London and him in Vienna – are trying to go through all the ‘live’ recordings that were made of our Mozart Series in Perth last season, in the hope of finding enough material to put together some kind of e-album, which we can make available for download. It seems too sad to let these recordings sit on a shelf. The concerts were such fun!

But I hate listening to recordings of myself, and always avoid it if I can. I’ve got lots of my own records I’ve never listened to after they were issued. I always found it hard to go from the role of performer to the role of observer/judge of my own playing. It feels like going from the role of giver to the role of taker – and as everyone knows, these can be two very different experiences.

When I was teaching a chamber group recently, one of the players commented that when she was playing, the tempo seemed just right, but when she was listening to others in the group playing (at a moment when there was nothing for her to play) then the tempo suddenly seemed mysteriously less satisfying. Too fast, too slow, whatever.

We agreed that producing the music onself, being influenced by one’s own heart beat, adrenalin, emotion and so on, makes it a subtly but crucially different experience from the one which the listener is having. Things that feel exactly right when you’re making the music may seem less convincing when you’re sitting, as I have been this week, with a notebook on your lap and a red pencil to pounce on wrong notes, intonation slips, coughing from the audience, and the like.

At any rate, I find that listening to my own recordings is a bit like watching a scary film through one’s fingers: you hardly dare to look. Though now and then I realise I’ve just heard something really nice; I can relax and not feel separate from the person who played. Yes, it sometimes worked as I hoped!  My red pencil stays poised in the air as I listen, and at the end of the movement I just write ‘yes’.

My book ‘Out of Silence’, in the Japanese translation by Noriko Ogawa, has just been chosen by ‘Chopin’ magazine in Japan as one of the best books of 2012.

It’s been such a pleasure to correspond with my various Japanese editors and readers, some of whom have sent me beautiful photos of Japan in various seasons. I always enjoy the meticulous commentary which accompanies the photographs – giving me the botanical names of flowers and trees, for example, or the history of the garden or park.

Who would have thought that Japanese would be the first language into which the book would be translated? I had imagined it might a European language, if anything. It was all Noriko’s doing, of course. Thanks to her determination to see the project through to publication, I’ve had a lovely time communicating with Japanese readers, pianists and other musicians this year.

‘At the Guildhall [during the Bath Mozartfest], pianist Susan Tomes joined forces with the Viennese fiddler Erich Hoebarth for an all-Mozart programme of four sonatas for ‘fortepiano with violin accompaniment’ and one of his most significant fragments, Fantasia in C minor for solo piano … While the sonatas with violin – (K307, 376, 378, 379) – date from the late 1770s or early 1780s, so hardly rank among his supreme masterpieces … it’s always a pleasure to hear Mozart on the threshhold of his astonishing final decade, especially in performances of such urbane grace and witty repartee…

‘To paraphrase Goethe’s description of the string quartet, this was a stimulating conversation between two intelligent people – ideal morning concert fare, in the company of two of the finest chamber musicians around.’

Sunday Times, 18 Nov 2012

A group of cormorants arrived on our local pond this week. They stood drying their wings in the sun, monopolising a floating platform which had been abandoned in a hurry by the smaller, meeker birds who usually potter about on it.

Close up, cormorants look like survivors of an ancient species, almost as if they are cousins of little dinosaurs. The look in their eye is particularly remote. They seem as if they might have dropped in from the Stone Age. The other residents of the pond – ducks, coots, gulls, moorhens and swans -  milled about at a respectful distance, looking like the cast of an amateur theatrical production by comparison with these tall, severe visitors.

We had a bag of bread to feed to the ducks, and when a couple of the cormorants came gliding by on the water we threw them some bread to see if they were interested, but they just sailed past without turning their heads.

We didn’t see the cormorants looking for fish, and in fact it’s ages since we’ve seen any birds diving for fish in the lake, so I don’t know what brought them to our peaceful park.

We took our Viennese visitor to Richmond Park for a walk in the winter sunshine. He was enchanted to see the deer roaming freely in the park, quite close at hand (see photo).

While we were watching this  group of deer, we witnessed a ‘raid’ by another stag. He ran up to the group, and was chased away by the bellowing stag in charge. But a moment afterwards, several female deer – after what looked like a lightning review of their prospects – detached themselves from the group and ran after the interloper. A moment later we turned and saw the splinter group  – the intruder and his new female companions – munching peacefully together on the other side of the lark meadow.

Erich said it reminded him of an old joke about a Turkish pasha who keeps a harem. One day he calls the women together and says, ‘Times are changing, and I must change with them. From now on, I must treat you more seriously, in line with modern customs. I must not withhold information from you any more. You deserve more respect. And therefore I must tell you: I have fallen in love with another harem.’