Rachmaninoff's concert, the first this season. He played a Beethoven sonata magnificently, Chopin not so well, and after that Mendelssohn's Rondo Capriccioso and three waltzes, by Chopin, himself, and from Gounod's Faust. If he had played a programme like that in Russia they would have thrown a dead cat at him. Of his own things only one Etude Tableau, very good indeed. Rachmaninoff preserves an Olympian detachment; some things he plays wonderfully, others like a block of wood, but his programme sell audiences short. In me he arouses a strange mixture of feelings: sometimes he absolutely transports me, at others exasperates me dreadfully. I went backstage after the concert, not so much to see him as to see other people I know. We exchanged a few words, but fairly coolly.