I am used to conducting now, so this morning the prospect held no terrors for me. Mama's friend Mme Pavskaya came at half past twelve and we went together to the Conservatoire.

Following an exhaustingly long recitation by Gabel of the year's activities, I opened the concert with Karnovich's Variations. The orchestra played badly, and in the event the variations proved to be rather uninteresting: there are some nice things in the piece but Karnovich is not going to become a significant composer. This was followed by the Tchaikovsky Concerto, which except for the inevitable shortcomings of a student orchestra went very well indeed. For instance, at one point Tcherepnin had asked for a tremendous sforzato from the timpani, so I indicated this with a particularly vigorous gesture that produced nothing at all: the timpanist sat calmly with his arms folded looking with interest at the audience in the boxes. It looked extraordinarily stupid. I happen to be particularly fond of this place in the score; I even had a dream about it last summer, in which the music appeared to me as I rushed headlong down a mountainside, ever faster, more impetuously and more enraptured by the sound . . .