My first experience of a public musical performance was at the Mariyinsky Theatre. My impressions of it are mixed with what I have been told, of course, but as a child of seven or eight I was taken to see A Life for the Tsar. The spectacle of the theatre itself and of the audience bewildered me and my mother said later that as I watched the stage, carried away by the sound of the orchestra – perhaps the greatest thrill of my life was the sound of that first orchestra – I asked her, as in Tolstoy, ‘Which one is the theatre?’