Believe it or not, I actually have a concert next week, though it will be a ‘closed door’ recording made without an audience. It’s part of the Edinburgh International Festival’s online offering which replaces the programme for this year’s cancelled Festival. A series of  performances by various artists will be filmed and recorded during August ‘as if live’, but without an audience, at The Hub in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.

Cellist Philip Higham and I will be recording an intriguing programme of music by Debussy,Beethoven, Martinu, Suk and Nadia Boulanger. It will be available in several ways during August: on August 11 the recording will be broadcast throughout Princes Street Gardens at lunchtime, through speakers hidden in the trees. I don’t think I’ve ever heard my own playing issuing from the trees, so I’m looking foward to this perhaps slightly surreal experience. As well as that, the filmed concert will be available on the Festival’s YouTube channel during August.

This is the one and only concert in my diary during the period of lockdown, everything else having been cancelled. It feels great to have something to practise for and look forward to. Even though there won’t be a live audience, there will be a small team of people looking after the sound and film aspects of the event, as well as the admin and backstage practicalities, and I’ll do what I always do in recordings: pretend that they are the audience and play to them.