The evening concert was the so-called Gala Concert, a benefit for the Domus Accident Appeal Fund... and at the interval, after the piece for multiple celli, people ate and drank while Steven Isserlis and I played Beatles songs. The long interval certainly made a difference to the atmosphere; the second half of the concert was noticeable warmer in tone, as Krysia found when she made a delightful introductory speech to the Trout Quintet. 'This piece is based on a song about a trout,' she said, 'and I was interested to find out what the song was about, so I looked it up in a dictionary and found that it was about a trout.' Actually this performance of the Trout Quintet, helped no doubt by the warm ambience, was one of the highlights of the whole summer, and several friends in the audience said the next day they would never forget it. I thought about this on the following day when we performed the piece again with no less spirit and no less objective flair but in the afternoon, when tradition converted it into a divertissement instead of an elating experience. At any rate the evening performance was judged to be one of the absolute high points of the summer: absolute in the sense that it transcended any personal cavils which could have been made against it. The Gala Concert in Battersea ended with a wonderful feeling of rapport between players and audience. It was only at the end that I really felt it: I had been so worried about the success of the whole evening that I couldn't tell whether it was going well or not, and I spent most of the evening averting my eyes from the cold faces of the cellists, or trying not to hear their disparaging comments as they changed into their white frocks in the sordid public loo. << less