The evening concert begins with a superb Mozart wind octet played by the Paris-Bastille octet. Afterwards, when I go to congratulate François Leleux, their marvellous oboist, someone asks him how they play such lovely soft staccato chords. He replies that the try to think like string players and use their breath as a string player would use the bow, preparing for the note with a graceful upbeat which cause the 'attack' to begin with the right sound. He says that in good music, there's natural tension in the phrase, and 'you don't need to put your own tension on top of the tension in the music'. Of course you need a very good player to rise above the physical and technical challenge of making the sound, but these are very good players - 'even thought French', as Tchaikovsky's correspondent Madame von Meck might have said.