After saying that we know the Schumann programme very well, I have to eat my words at the Osaka concert, or at least in the rehearsal, where, in perverse reaction to yesterday's feeling of security and stability, everybody starts complaining about things they didn't like yesterday. Tempi have got lazy, some are far too fast for no good reason; requests are made for others to stop doing little characteristic things which have suddenly become annoying, like playing 'descant' phrases with exaggerated rhythmic freedom, or too loudly, or without due regard to someone else's overlapping phrase. Suddenly I'm sitting there thinking, 'I can't believe it was only this morning that I wrote about how secure this programme feels!' I wonder about the psychological mechanism that makes us do this. Instead of building on our strengths, we seem to yearn from insecurities - as if it's only through these 'holes in the fabric' that new ideas will emerge. And in a way I suppose it is after all a mark of security that we can dare to say these destabilising things right before an important concert, and profit from the experience. In fact we do: the needling of one another in rehearsal results in new things being tried and new things being felt in the concert, with happy results - though even as I'm thinking so, I simultaneously wonder whether an outsider would notice any difference from last night's concert. Is it a bit like the story of the princess and the pea - oversensitivity to some miniscule change? << less