The next day is a more typical Domus concert, with a first half composed of Eastern European pieces - Janácek, Bartók, Penderecki, Chopin, Dohnányi - lent sudden gravity in the middle by a quietly emotional speech by Krysia about freedom of action in Poland and how impossible it would be to build a geodesic dome there and give concerts in it. The audience, once again middle-aged to elderly, suffers this political speech in tolerant silence, and afterwards comment that it was perhaps 'slightly out of place in a concert'. Nevertheless we are all touched by it, and pleased that she did it. The second half is the Mendelssohn Trio, unrehearsed because the rugby pavilion, where Felix's cello was stored overnight, was locked until an hour before the concert. We have not played the piece since our rather unsuccessful and aggressive performance of it in Canada, and the memory of this, too, makes us reluctant to confront it before we absolutely have to. But when we do, it becomes pliant in our hands. It is one of those strange occasions where the character of a piece changes without any particularly intention on the part of the players. We surprise ourselves with our capacity to be mellow at a time when we are all in fact feeling brittle. << less