On Steven's first evening with us we happened to be doing a performance of Tierkreis, without his participation as he very snootily refused to have anything to do with it. Unlike the German audiences, however, the Cheltenham audience was embarrassed and annoyed by the piece, and after the concert Steven began a litany of complaint about our interpretation of it which became more and more insistent until he was all but insisting that we take the piece out of the Final Concert on the grounds that we would drive away any possible audience if we left it in. This made us all feel insecure right up to the final concert, when moral fibre impelled us to leave the piece in the programme if only to demonstrate our resistance to tyranny. But on the second occasion I introduced the piece with a much longer explanation of why we liked it, the various odd coincidences which had accompanied our learning of it, and the unfolding process which the audience would hear in it. This time the reception was completely different, and the audience seemed to be enthralled. Steven gave me a filthy look as we were taking our bows, so I knew it had been a success, and later I said to him, 'I hope you've eaten your words.' 'I have not,' he replied in the original squeaky voice. 'If I hadn't given you all such a bollocking about it, you would never have taken to much trouble to get it so good.' Despite Krysia's initial superstition about playing the Schubert Quintet without David, they did play it in the last concert, and it was fascinatingly different with Steven playing the second cello part and acting as the rhythmical powerhouse of the group. The last movement in particular was ten times as good as it had ever been in Germany with Steven chiselling away all its soft edges, and Krysia's violin suddenly began to sound like its old self after the trauma it had clearly experienced during the accident. << less