To return to my storyline: actually, Mahler, whose third symphony we were rehearsing, is all about stories. Nature pictures, picaresque tales, children's nursery rhymes - all these fired his creativity. But when it came to publishing he didn't want this music labelled. Take one of his original titles in this symphony, "Pan Awakes": it could sound like a cheesy print for sale in a dodgy antique shop. On Mahler's title page it might trivialise the actual soul shuddering sounds that irrupt in this symphony. The image would become a barrier between you and the inner meaning of that soul shuddering. 'Meaning' is the wrong word - I should say 'feeling'. Mahler was groping for something here, egged on by Nietzsche, whose poem he chose for the fourth movement. The message might be: this soul shuddering pain and suffering - this is life - you can't separate it from beautiful vistas and nursery rhymes. Grasp this truth - be blinded by joy. Enlightenment. Mahler didn't want to flog us a cheesy print, even if he was a genius at painting the natural world in music. He wanted us to have a life transforming experience. No, our own imagination, welling up from our own psyche, is more powerful than any second hand image he could summon. The true story remains hidden. Our own story - this is the one he yearns to awake. He told Sibelius that he wanted his music to draw deeply on all human experience. Sibelius didn't agree - his thing was intellectual rigour. Now, that's interesting: do you think Sibelius' music contains any less human life than Mahler's, or that Mahler's lacks intellectual rigour? Elgar's first symphony was the other biggie we were wrestling with last week. Is Elgar's miraculous symphony any less of an epic journey of the soul than the massive Mahler, or than Sibelius' ultra-compressed seventh? Incidentally, the Sibelius, a pinnacle of intellectual rigour, uses a solo trombone in an uncannily similar role to the Mahler. If you're ever tempted to think that Sibelius' music is abstract, imagine this trombone solo played by an oboe, or a glockenspiel, and then explain to me what the difference is. .....well, let's not start that debate today....

Today's debate is on how we go about getting the notes right, and then making them even more right. What's in the cracks between flawless perfection and heart gripping inspiration? (I know that's a tautology, but I like its natty ring.) I wonder if any of you were in the City Hall a few years ago when Ida Haendel played the Sibelius violin concerto with us. She started life as a prodigy, equal to Barenboim in being able to play the great concertos flawlessly by the age of ten, but at our concert, when she was in her mid seventies, the crystalline perfection of her earlier years wasn't in the foreground - something bigger got in the way - it was electrifying. From my seat, the conductor's baton was directly in line between me and her eyes. As she played a piercing look shot out, saying, "The only way this music can sound is the way I'm about to play it." Yield or die. I've never experienced storytelling like it. Totally unique, unlike any other performance. Sibelius' great music, yes, but her story. Now, I'm not suggesting Donald wanted all 107 of us in the Mahler to be as idiosyncratic as Ida Handel - I'm interested in the power behind what she was doing. It didn't seem to lie in spontaneous flights of imagination. Have you ever read stories to children, or heard someone who is very good at it doing so? There is a way that a reader's own passion and emotion - fear, suspense, surprise, relief, celebration - has to deliver the text, like a powerful horse carrying a knight. Without his steed, the fearsome knight is immobilised, clumsy and vulnerable - nothing more than an idea - a potentiality - a text. However imaginative the text, it needs the power of a steed to deliver it. The child is not too bothered about the text - it's the emotional journey that counts. The child soaks up, 'learns', emotional processes through live contact with the reader. Later in life, adult sophistication develops, and the child's wonderful faculty atrophies.

And this is where the scientific bit comes in. Clever new fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans have been watching our brains. They've seen that the brain processes of a listener instantly mirror those of the reader and, astoundingly, often anticipate the reader's. How do you explain that? They also discovered an interesting subtlety: the better the listener is at reading, the stronger this reaction becomes. Three implications leap out at me. (Health warning: I'm guessing, I'm not a scientist.) 1: I've always said that you, the listener, know what's 'right' as we are actually playing. The reader or performer must establish an emotional connection that is stronger than the text. If the reader is speaking in a foreign language, or the player is playing by rote (i.e. with no emotional investment, like phonetically rendering a foreign text) then there is no communication. 2: The emotional subtext is actually the main text. We are gripped by, or 'understand', the emotional text fractionally ahead of the verbal one. 3: Does all this imply that it's especially important for children (that's all of us) to learn to play instruments emotionally, not just with sufficient dexterity to pass exams? Our emotional responses evolved long before speech, before the written word, or written music. These responses are quicker than the rational analytical processes needed for language. In emergencies, we've all experienced how we can act quicker than we can think. These responses fire out from 'deeper' layers of our consciousness. Many people talk about how music keys into our shared humanity, regardless of language barriers - a possible explanation lies in this area of emotional communication. This aspect has to be the most important, and it's the one which atrophies if we allow the rational and analytical aspects to dominate. A couple more examples like the Haendel one: I think it was Kreisler who described Casals as using his bow like a sword. How does it feel to have Casals, or anyone, waving a sword in front of our face? (Just his scowl was scary enough, enough to transfix you like a rabbit in headlights.) Did you see the Barenboim master class following our Mahler 3 relay on BBC 4, where he recounted Horowitz challenging him to use his will? "You have to always have will (pronounced, veel)." How do you react when a Barenboim or Haendel pin their eyes on you, charged with a million volts of veel?

I rest my case. If there's any sense contained in my ramblings, then other issues follow on. For instance, how important is it for music to be live - a live, shared event - held in venues with good sightlines and helpful acoustics? However satisfying and potentially valuable in their own right, do video games, virtual sport, film, or recorded music - all of them electronic, essentially artificial vicarious experiences - fulfil deeper human needs? Finally, what if all 107 of us had played with the laser power of Ida Handel? We'd have probably blasted you gasping backwards out of the concert hall, scrabbling to get back in for more. That might have been what Donald was hoping for - all six thousand of you in the Albert Hall.

Greg Lawson
Principal Second Violin

What's the DNA behind this addiction? Lord Martin Rees put his finger on it the other day, in one of his current Reith Lectures looking at the frontiers of science: "Problem solving motivates us all." There is something in the way that music presents problems for the body, mind, and the group. The process of building a performance, the process of discovering how to do things on my cello, opening awareness to problems, solving them, realising the power of the group to help (or hinder) - all this becomes more fascinating as I get older. It's powerfully addictive - it'll make a teenager practise for countless hours (and countless more), or make another teenager persist with the endlessly repetitive research needed to underpin discovery and advance. To get addicted to the real stuff you have to start taking it young - to experience those highs and lows, to experience the real emotions, and so be able to recognise the true thing later in life. The emotional and spiritual spin off from the mere music sometimes seems to be only the icing on the cake. But what nice icing!

Orkney is my favourite gig - I've done every SSO trip since the festival started. There's an unfussy culture here - relaxing - even if you're busy. The unique local weather system gathers you in to itself. From my digs in town I hear cattle, curlews, oystercatchers, even a skylark..... when the trumpeter stops practising Firebird. Stand still anywhere and the sea soaks into your consciousness - through views, smells, and glistening refracted light. Stand still anywhere and the deep past murmurs in your ear - summoning a strange numinous feeling in me........real people, long lost in oblivion, call from the ancient and beautiful archaeological sites, putting my miniscule life in perspective, beckoning me to return gratefully into their embrace when my time comes. Our jaunt here started with a 'Side by Side' concert - about eighty school kids playing alongside us. I wish we'd had something like that when I was at school. Next concert was with the Festival Chorus. They will have rehearsed hard and long for this - the sense of culmination and achievement is mixed into the addict's brew. This is a musical field trip - out where music grows. What's happening here? See what Abreu says. What struck me was how he identified the cardinal ill as the "feeling of being no-one" - not the lack of food or roof. I was struck by that - I'd just heard John Humphrys on 'Today' live from Athens interviewing musicians from the threatened symphony orchestra there, and he'd described an orchestra as a luxury. Is it? If it is, then why is it? If it is, then maybe it's lost its plot! What niggled me was how that casual phrase, used provocatively to trigger discussion, reinforced a widespread misconception about the importance of music for community. If it is only elite entertainment, then it has lost its way, and is a luxury. What part in this is played by the dickie-bowed elite?

Anyway, getting back to Orkney: day four, and couple of groups go off to the islands, leaving the rest us of behind in the hands of aspiring conductors - centre piece of an arduous conductors' course. Music at any level, from kindergarten, through school years, to local groups, and on into the profession, needs proficient and inspirational conductors - or it'll be dead in the water. How important is that? We should note: El Sistema in Venezuela is breeding herds of inspirational conductors, along with all its new orchestras. Oh, of course, I forgot to mention: we've two regular symphony concerts, including Nicola Benedetti playing Szymanovski no. 1 - that's worth the trip for itself.

Coming back to the Side by Side event, it highlighted one of the most interesting observations from auditions in Venezuela for its new National Youth Orchestra. Players came from all over the country to audition - some too young and inexperienced to be able to play the orchestral extracts solo at audition - but they were put in the section actually playing Mahler, and they quickly began to play those very passages that they could hardly read or play solo. In the end, many of these kids wouldn't be offered a place, but they'd take something invaluable back to their 'nucleos' in remote towns - new skills.....a bit more frustration, a bit more determination.... How did we learn before we had tick boxes?

You'll have realised that this is all getting me rather excited. So much more than providing musical wall paper, more than handing out cultural largesse from an ivory tower - all from some city down south - we're out getting our hands dirty in the growing fields of culture. This reminds me, my allotment will need urgent remedial action when I get back.

From there, I found myself many hours later sitting in the festival club listening to the extraordinarily intimate and beautiful playing of Alistair Savage and his Trio which brought my mind and soul to a stillness that echoed within me as I walked the quiet and thankfully wind free streets back home.

Greg Lawson
Principal Second Violin

Greg Lawson
Principal Second Violin

I'm not carping at critics or audiences. Audiences here in Glasgow are on the increase. We're all in this together - professional players more so - it's the whole music thing that gets me excited. The underlying problem is human nature. (.....so what's new?) Our radar is designed to scan for the exceptional. We miss what's in front of our noses - the here and now. And we want things to be simple and obvious, clear, unequivocal and explainable. We want our own judgement to be vindicated - to be seen publicly to be right. We want to be associated with the winning team. We want to re-assure ourselves that we're getting value for money. Managers need profit to create an event in the first place. Societies measure themselves on their cultural envoys. Along with this, great conductors and soloists display phenomenal skill and intellect, which taps into deep feelings of tribal affiliation, pride, and celebration. All this has got me thinking again about the wagon loads of preconceptions and agendas, expectations and moods, enthusiasms and prejudices, which we bring to a concert - agendas that we couldn't leave outside the hall even if we wanted to - agendas that are going to impact on the concert even as we take our seats. Music's operational territory lies in subterranean realms - deep and instinctive zones.

One comment caught my eye: under Dudamel the LA players are moving their bodies more. No surprises if you've seen him with the Bolivars. Let's talk about that. Joseph Swensen, conductor emeritus of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, said that we have to teach the audience to listen. Not that they need initiating into arcane knowledge, rather that the players need to spark the audience's attention, drawing them into deeper engagement with the music and away from those other agendas. This is the sweaty forge of performance and interpretation. (As conductor, soloist, and composer, Swensen should have a good idea what 'works'.) Perhaps the art of listening lies in staying in the moment, feeling the here and now - shunning cerebral and political assessments. When we attempt to define things we leave the instinctive zone of physical communication - our mind hops into judgement mode and we lose contact with the moment. As a player, I hunger for the visceral, not cerebral. As player or audience, I want dialogue - two way giving - a two way embrace - essential for a relationship to survive the honeymoon fantasies.

I keep coming back to this - the physical aspects of music - not the intellectual concepts. Do we go to a concert primarily for a cerebral experience, or something more physical? We're hungry for something - heart, soul, and mind. We can listen to as much as we like at home - so why go to a concert? Musical experience evolved in the human landscape long before words and language. There's something powerful here - it's deeper than words - a treasure that can't be brought up to the surface - ineffable. That's a posh word for something that can't be described in words. 'Semiotic' is an even posher word: it's to do with the meaning behind gestures and symbols - the power behind words - behind music. This 'meaning' is a gamut of experiences that can't be shoehorned into word shaped boxes. Music is gesture......but only when it is played as such. Our classical culture tends to shun showy gestures, dismissing them as histrionics. And so an extraordinary pianist like Lang Lang is criticised for his physical gesturing......then why is he so spectacularly successful? Does successful equal less than the best......? Ravi Shankar's collaboration with Menuhin fascinated me by the differences between them. It's no surprise that musicians from Menuhin to the Beatles clamour to glean from the productive fields of Indian gestural culture. As we put composers and conductors on pedestals, we take our eyes off the real treasure - the physical experience of live music making. Orchestras don't need conductors to beat time or show players when to come in - both orchestra and audience need the conductor to summon up underlying musical gestures - to open up and share the emotional journey. Runnicles and Dudamel cite Bernstein for inspiration - the most gestural and histrionic conductor ever. A musical phrase might sound OK on a record, but in performance an incongruent gesture can detract from the same phrase, even killing it dead. Get both right, and then you've got the power - the force is with you - live communication that will feed a relationship long after the honeymoon.

How does this deeper power manifest itself? Why is it so much more important than pizzazz and honeymoons? It seems that every week scientists discover new aspects of the way music works within in us - sensors see into the brain in finer and finer detail. Last week I read that the onset of dementia can be slowed, if not halted, with the help of music: in the ailing mind, learning and understanding can be re-activated simply by being exposed to music. Any music therapist or kindergarten teacher could have told you this, but now the neurological processes have been observed. (I would ask: Why did music ever stop being part of a person's life?) Music enables an autistic person to communicate feelings, their inner and ineffable humanity, and so connect and 'belong' with other people - building a spiritual bridge over the lethal void of isolation. Equally so for blind people. But if all that's true, it's true for all of us, not just those of us with specific disabilities, or those of us being rescued from broken communities by El Sistema projects. Label them disabilities, disadvantages, or illnesses - we're all humans on the same continuum. We all originated in communities where music was something that everyone in the group did together - as you can still witness in any 'undeveloped' area of the world. Music was a living 'now' event, not entertainment, and certainly not about subtleties of interpretation. Another aspect of all this: as we became 'civilised' we moved into nice houses - houses that bottle us up, weaken our 'belonging' ligaments, and separate us in ways for which evolution has not prepared us. This isolation breeds fears and anxieties unknown to our musical ancestors. Depression has the second highest morbidity in the developed world, leading to personal and social complications, and mindboggling costs in sick pay and treatment. Music can help. These gestural languages - they might be ineffable, beyond words - but that doesn't mean they're any less universally powerful forces of nature (forces of life and death to Dudamel and El Sistema). Composers and players can't ignore them, let alone change them, just because they don't fit into their intellectual agendas. We can simply tap into them. We can even, "Enjoy the ride!" - as Catherine Bott said, introducing our Rachmaninov second symphony live on Radio 3.

There's a tradition, particularly in some German orchestras, that auditions are competitions in which mistakes are meticulously counted - note perfection being the over-riding criterion - to be settled by a final round 'play off'. Another tradition, particularly in America, is that the candidates play behind a screen, so that the panel can't be biased by colour, age or sex. Both approaches leave us with the question: How would we go about judging those additional subjective ingredients? Should music be subjective, or objective and measureable? What's better: a player who inspires you to get up and dance, who moves you in bits that you didn't know moved, but who plays the occasional bum note, or a player who reliably nails every note? What's music for? Is music a performance, a community event, or is it notes on a page? Who matters most: the producer with the engineer who edits the tape, or the live audience? I know these aren't 'either-or' questions - but there's fun to be had exploring ideas. By now, you'll have heard the clip clop of my hobby horse. And, as always, I'm also looking for ways to detract attention from my own mistakes. Well......don't be hard on me......self criticism, navel contemplation, rampant paranoia - an artist without these is probably not an artist at all.

The Teresa Careño youth orchestra of Caracas, also a Sistema orchestra (see them in London on 12th October), seems to be taking over the Bolivar's mantle. They're of a genuine 'high school' age. I was watching them on YouTube, and suddenly found myself choking and tearful. Why? I think my tears were something to do with, "Heavens, if only I'd been taught to play like that." Quality of teaching. In their hands the power of music is unleashed, flowing out through their bodies and gestures.....in torrents. The Sistema kids start young - four and younger - and, most important of all, they learn in the group as a group, not alone in a room with a teacher. However much I loved my teachers - both of them gentle and reserved individuals - I'm wondering what it was that they couldn't do for me, bearing in mind that I didn't start till aged eleven? There is nothing magic about the skills needed to play a musical instrument - all children have access to amazing skills, unless hampered by specific disabilities - and those skills really clock in when needed to compensate for specific disabilities, with miraculous effect. None of us in the SSO was a prodigy. Think what skills are implicit in things that we take for granted: running over rocks, throwing and catching with precision, playing football, speaking several incredibly complex languages, climbing and swinging in trees, chopping and cutting. Kids don't even need teachers to do that stuff. By contrast, the most hi-tech robot needs twenty minutes to fold a towel! The point being that robots aren't able to choose what to do and then evaluate their achievements. You might have seen the robot that plays Land of Hope and Glory on the violin - incredible. There's a robot that does drawings of faces - by reproducing the light and shade. But robots can't assess their own efforts and make aesthetic judgements. They can't respond to the myriad of messages reflecting back from the world around them. In a word, they're not paranoid - they haven't even got a navel to contemplate!

This Sistema teaching thing - it's so natural and obvious. It's mixed into how our species evolved its huge advantages. The infant begins with a period of complete dependency, and then is up and running by the age of four - running out with the older kids, imitating, joining in, competing, being challenged.......being seriously and scarily challenged. Then there's a long period of learning during which children soak up skills and crafts. (Feed them junk philosophy and irrelevant skills and they'll soak those up equally well - until they see through it, rebel, and are left with nothing.) Mind and body, the whole person, whole people, are needed for teamwork. Older folk (old codgers of waning agility) remain around the home to teach. This long adolescent apprenticeship period is unique to our species, and is a key to our advantages. The Sistema kids look wonderful as they play - together creating an overwhelming sort of tribal unanimity. This shows in our own Sistema children, even within the first year. Over the years, I've sat on countless audition panels. What looks right invariably is right. There is rarely any discussion or disagreement about what looks right. Kids taught in this Sistema way will have a massive evolutionary advantage. There's an interesting parallel here: those kids from our distant past that I just mentioned were learning skills as a matter of life or death, actually and for real. Sistema teachers don't do 'gentle and reserved'. Sistema teachers from Venezuela visiting Big Noise talk in terms of 'playing as if life depended on it' - for many of them this had been their experience 'actually and for real'. My putative job description was perfectly appropriate.

I started with a thought experiment - the idea of me playing with the Bolivars. What would I look like if I was dropped down in the middle of them? How about running that experiment in reverse? How would Sistema kids fit in with our orchestras? There's going to be hundreds of them 'graduating' every year. How will Big Noise kids from Raploch feel doing our job, alongside us? From Stirling, Caracas, or anywhere else in the world, will they feel that the typical European orchestra is the culmination and fulfilment of what they have been doing since the age of four?

So, after the Bolivars and the Teresa Careño, who next? By definition, the flagship 'youth' orchestra will have to be replaced every few years. In Venezuela 350,000 children are currently playing in Sistema orchestras, with 15,000 associated teachers. Sistema follows a 'social' vision, not a cultural one. The vision is to nurture self esteem, strengthen education, and free children from restrictive and damaging communities - freedom from dead-end life styles and dead-end philosophies. It was never meant that the kids should go on to be professional musicians - though currently about 10% are doing so. So, consider: the UK has twice the population of Venezuela - in UK equivalent that would give us 70,000 very well qualified young orchestral players, and 30,000 instrumental teachers. Draw your own conclusions. And Sistema projects are taking root worldwide - there are already four projects in the UK. I've been wondering.....the big question: In the sixties and seventies, the folk music revolution spread like wild fire, almost eclipsing the formal and prescriptive 'folk' culture typified by the Mod and the Eisteddfod. Hoards of musicians in jeans, informal and liberated, created a massive world market for themselves. The history of Blues and Jazz is similar. Whole new genres evolved, filling deep needs that were not being met by existing music. These musicians don't only try to recreate historic formats - they embody a plethora of creative styles, voraciously searching out novelty, cross fertilising with everything they meet. This is win-win for everyone - culture, community, identity and ethnicity - creativity thrives on it, and dies if starved of it. To conclude: Could there be a tidal wave bearing down on us - a massive new, informal and liberated version of classical music? Classics in jeans?

Here's a couple of links: one to a blog by Lorrie Heagy, an American Abreu Fellow from Juneau in Alaska, who has just spent several weeks in Venezuela, and is coming to spend time with Big Noise. The other is similar, including fascinating discussions of Sistema ideas and lots of astounding information, particularly about the auditioning process. They contain an overview of Sistema at work, illustrated by many short videos from all over Venezuela.

Well... we did... and we did just that by creating a whole new piece... In March this year the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra performed and recorded Mozart's wonderful masterpiece - the 'Linz' Symphony (he wrote it in 1783 whilst stopping for a few days in the town of Linz in Austria, when travelling from Salzburg to Vienna). He was 27 years old, and this was his 36th Symphony (K.425).

He needed to put on a pair of concerts for his patrons at short notice - and finding himself with out a symphony in his baggage - wrote one... in 4 days flat.... !

So we decided to unravel his composition techniques a little - giving ourselves the same time - 4 days! .... and involving not only players from the BBC SSO, but also (because at present the so-called "poco adagio" movement from the 'Linz' Symphony sits on the Scottish Higher reference works' list) Glasgow School Students and National Youth Orchestra of Scotland players, the result was that we created a whole new mini-symphony... and we called it "Disco Linz"...

Mozart's 'Linz' Symphony is the first of the composer's last few grand symphonies, which, for the 18th century, are completely modern and contemporary in their sound world; so, just as Mozart did, we created our piece in the modern sound world...everyone in the group brought their own diverse influences to the music they created, and that music became the 3 movement mini-symphony....

The project culminated in a professional recording on the stage at City Halls, Glasgow (home of the BBC SSO) for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3 alongside the BBC SSO's own performance of Mozart's piece in Radio 3's programme 'Discovering Music'.

Fraser Trainer was the creative director of the project. Here he talks to Tom Service:

So who took part?

A wonderful and inspiring melting-pot of 12 creative musicians was assembled from three different musical institutions: 5 musicians from Glasgow Schools, 3 musicians from the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland (NYOS), and 3 musicians from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. One of Scotland's leading young composers Stuart MacRae also joined the team on piano, and the creative process was led, and conducted by Fraser Trainer.

Participants: Glasgow School pupils Beth, Maria, James, Thomas and Jamie. NYOS players Peter Longworth, Caroline Sharp and Matt Bain. BBC SSO players Peter Jones, Iain Crawford, Hedley Benson and composer Stuart MacRae.

Those who took part in the project were both the composers, and the performers. Through creative improvisation and playing...

Here are some of the Creative Musicians:

Beth - Clarinet - Glasgow School Student talking to Tom Service:

Peter Longworth - Trumpet - National Youth Orchestra of Scotland talking to Tom Service:

Iain Crawford - Double Bass - BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra talking to Tom Service:

So How does it relate to Mozart's 'Linz' Symphony.. I hear you ask....

Well, Disco Linz is a 3 movement mini-symphony using the following techniques found in Mozart's Symphony to inspire and give structure to the composition:

Fraser Trainer: explains the structure of the piece:

1. Slow 9 beat introduction - with increasing intervals

2. Number Patterns - 1,2,3,4,5

3. Interruptions

4. Siciliana Rhythm

5. Deconstruction

6. Slow introduction recapulation

7. Mini-Minuet (ABCDAB)

So in summary.. here's Fraser Trainer again....

What a great project this was.. and I think we all feel not only a little bit closer to Mozart, but to ourselves too.. we all have music within us to create, compose, perform and be confident in our own voices... Hope you enjoy it as much as we have...

I hear voices.....often - those of Barenboim, Rattle, Runnicles, Manze, Kovacevich, and many many more of that ilk - voices cheer leading for the same issues - the voices of stars of our firmament, not wee fragments of space rubble like me. What are these pet subjects? Spontaneity, freedom, engaged listening, music education - that sort of stuff. For example: I was listening to the Music Matters edition where Tom Service was talking to Stephen Kovacevich. In his charmingly acerbic manner Stephen was quite rude about colleagues: pianists who "type" music, and string players who want to imitate those typing pianists - all very accomplished and musical, but not music making that's going to grab you where you need grabbing. Nor was he much kinder to the audience: too many "only want entertainment" - he doesn't sense much "hunger" to listen, to discover additional riches in the great masters. Of course, he was quick to add that he didn't want to generalise.......so he isn't including you personally! Is he concerned that classical music has lost its edge? (He certainly hasn't lost his edge - catch his stunning live Schubert A major sonata on iPlayer). They played a bit of a Rachmaninov recording, the middle section of Schubert's famous A flat impromptu, as an example of what it's all about. I'll come back to that - those few seconds of vintage recording seem to corral all the pet subjects.

Barenboim embarked me on a train of thought in his Reith lectures a few years ago: he was asking if we have lost the art of listening. (Barenboim and du Pré created a dual orbit that exerted a massive gravitational pull on the whole musical world.) He was worried about the future of classical music. That's been an alarum ringing around for a few years. Personally, I don't think classical music is sinking any further into oblivion than the works of Rembrandt or Shakespeare. But. There may be something awry. Perhaps, not so much a destructive force, but a lack of force: entropy. That's a posh word, and you might not be familiar with it, but I don't apologise for using it. I like its broader philosophical meaning: how creative energy weakens, levels down, dissipates, and becomes impotent. (Its specific meaning in physics is important, particularly if you feel the need to debate the 'purpose' of creation: 'entropy increases as matter and energy in the universe degrade to an ultimate state of inert uniformity'.) Is creative energy dissipating - is entropy increasing? Stephen also fired a few shots at the recording business. He quoted Arthur Rubinstein: "You can't play as well as you play on your CDs." "People think that is how music should sound." So, my main question is: Has there been a price to pay for CD saturation? Is typing 'better' than hand writing? Recorded music floods around us, and we don't give it any more thought than the air we breathe. I have music on when I'm cooking or ironing - at which point I lose touch with the 'event' of that music - that's the performer, the human being struggling and achieving - and this is hardly helped if I also know that this 'performance' is an edited jigsaw of hundreds of retakes. Are our powers of attention and creative listening being degraded by this sort of process? If I'm having a conversation with you, or anyone, what happens if one (or both!) of us is not listening - if one of us is not 'present' with the other? Would that damage one or other of us?

The Schubert impromptu played by Rachmaninov (did you click on the link to listen to it?) erupts with volcanic creative energy. In the middle section the 'boring' quaver accompaniment surges back and forward - emotions straining like a huge dog on a lead. No-one is suggesting Schubert would have played like that. Nor like Horowitz or Richter - two legendary pianists you can hear doing it from the same YouTube page (Richter playing live, with mistakes). My interest is not in whether this is a 'nice' interpretation, it's about what is happening at this event. These few minutes of Schubert open a window into Rachmaninov's soul. Not for the faint hearted. If Schubert had to choose between two versions, Rachmaninov's or a brilliant pianist 'typing' what he thought Schubert intended, which would he choose? Rachmaninov's soul is in Schubert's blood line. Talking about blood, we've been working at Rachmaninov's first symphony. The first performance of this was a disaster - neither he nor his music was given any credibility. A fiasco - and it led to his total breakdown. What music this is! What's it all about? He seems to be striving out beyond Tchaikovsky, his idol - excavating depths of emotion, and soaring to heights of exaltation. How are we, mere mortals, going to perform this? How can we do it justice? At that first performance, could the conductor Glazunov - a well established composer, urbane, talented - humble himself to this upstart music? Perhaps some players were able to 'get' this music, but what could they do - in a programme of first performances, difficult notes, under rehearsed, and a conductor who was neither bothered nor sober (allegedly)? Maybe the problem was that in his soul Glazunov did actually 'get it' - that here was a young composer who was going to become one of the most popular composers ever - everything that Glazunov dreamt of (....have a few more vodkas). Here was a star pulling everything into a different orbit. Anyway, nobody was listening to anyone. Rachmaninov dared to speak his soul - and he was sneered at. No wonder he collapsed.

How are we expected to listen to this music, or give voice to its visceral, searing melancholy? Maybe we have to stand back from the heat? We've been given a glimpse into his soul, how should we react? Pretend we didn't see? Excoriate him for his excess? We can always level the music down to something 'more acceptable' - play or listen without noticing the real meaning - allowing it to blend into a comfortable and inert uniformity along with the other musical wall paper in our lives. Enjoy the nice tunes? Play it as muzak in the lift.......that's Barenboim's nightmare! A piano trio by Rachmaninov, the second Trio Elégiaque, is a massive, expansive, grief laden work in response to the death of his mentor, Tchaikovsky - a work which, along with the first symphony, the first suite for two pianos, and several others written before his breakdown, leads me to feel that he was reaching the end of a road. Could he have pushed musical emotion any further......I wonder? Anyway, at that fiasco he got the message, he was listening (he was found crying on the back stairs): when he'd picked himself up (which took three years) he moderated himself, toned things down.......and then went on to produce winners like the second piano concerto and cello sonata. In some of his early music the wounds seem to gape open - some healing must have been needed before life could go on.

An afterthought tenuously linked to the stuff above: Tchaikovsky also wrote a piano trio - a massive, expansive virtuosic work, in response to the death of his mentor Nicolai Rubinstein. Barenboim, du Pré, and Zukerman performed it in Israel during a final period of remission before Jacky's MS diagnosis, and the end of her playing career. There is a recording of this performance - the live event, with plenty of mistakes. It's stunning and unrepeatable. Plug your ears deep into headphones, and you can feel the electricity sparking - adventure, freedom, elation. Hindsight adds an unbearable poignancy to this event. How much poorer would we be without recordings like this and the Rachmaninov? They can't be imitated, or emulated. No amount of jigsaw editing could achieve such an effect. You can't type a copy of these. Their power can't be faked - this power can only erupt from its own magma chamber.

At our pre-concert discussion last night, Greg Lawson surprised me with a quote, about how Brahms said that he wished bar lines could be abolished. We know that the essence of interpreting Brahms lies in achieving a flexible feeling about bar lines, making sure the musical paces don't sound the way they are written. There are some piano roll fragments of Brahms playing his own Hungarian dances - pieces which he usually included in his recitals. Like antique scuffed photos, they don't initially tell us much. But boffins in white coats with powerful computers have scrutinised them, revealing just how Brahms shifted his bar lines and had a distinctly improvisatory attitude to the written text, to the extent that no two quavers or crotchets are ever the same length, even when he was bothering to play the written notes. Greg was telling us how impossible it is to write down the subtleties of Eastern European folk music (he plays a lot of it) - you can't "square it off" or get it into the tick boxes. Thinking about bar lines this week, as the boss told us to, I was remembering a couple of inspirational classes at college. The Spanish violinist Antonio Brosa was one of the veteran professors when I was there. He got his pupils to go through their copies scratching out the bar lines with a razor blade. (Here's a natty coincidence: at home after last night's performance of the Britten violin concerto, I read the programme note, to discover that Brosa was Britten's friend and the first performer of the concerto.) I went for lessons with him when working with one of his students on Beethoven's violin and cello duos. He was tearing his hair out trying to get us, me in particular, to play more operatically - huge phrases riding high over the bar lines - huge operatic vibrato (wobble) achieved by jamming two fingers together to double the spread of the wobble - and this effulgence just for these humble bits of tafelmusik. Grief....if I'd played like that for Donald's Beethoven 7 last week I'd have been suspended on full pay pending an enquiry. (Thinks....that would be a good ruse.) Well, I had an idea: why don't we print a version (loads of people have the software to do this) of a Brahms symphony - with no bar lines? The conductor would only be allowed to show the music, never the three or the four of it. And see how we get on.

Before I leave my favourite subject of bars: did you see the Simon Russell Beale Sacred Music programme about Brahms and Bruckner? Was that the actual bar, the Red Hedgehog, in which Brahms and Bruckner had met for cold pils? There's something moving and significant about the fact that those two were so crusty with each other - could either have acknowledged that they were both creative giants, climbing up different sides of the same mountain? They were both well established, but does that mean that they could have been able to see just how far up that mountain each had reached. Could they have realised, at that point in time, how great their own or the other's music was? For me, that scene in the pub was inordinately exciting. Which tells you two things: 1, I really do need to get out more, and 2, after so many years immersed in the music and thought processes of these men, they seem to live with me like real people, playing a significant part in my emotional life.

A couple of things have got me brooding. I went to a number of Celtic Connections shows, enjoying the easy going atmosphere and infectiously engaged audiences. I envy that so much. I'm not dissing our own audiences, but I am hinting that I sometimes feel that we've missed an important bus. And sometimes I even feel that we, the players and critics, might be guilty of being a bit like those surly unwelcoming bus drivers. Andrew Marr, in a recent Radio 4 'Start the Week', was chatting to John Adams ("the world's most successful composer") and Adams was retorting that despite his success, his music occupies only the tiniest space on a shared shelf at the back of a CD store - classical, folk and jazz occupying only about ten percent of the global shelving. Taking part in that conversation was Philip Ball, whose book 'The Music Instinct: how music works and why we can't do without it' has just been published. (He gave an illustrated presentation of the book at Glasgow's 'Aye Write' festival on the same day.) Between them they seemed to agree that classical music is opening up a little - something easier to achieve within American culture. They agreed that one of the great barriers is the prevailing idea that we have to 'understand' music, and have specialist knowledge. No. We have to feel it. Philip Ball's main thesis is that we all have a tremendous innate facility for music - music in all its aspects - and we all already 'know' all that we need to know. He calls music 'gymnastics for the brain': no other human activity lights up the sensors in every area of the brain at the same time. Educationalists increasingly talk about the importance of music in developing emotional intelligence - though for heaven's sake don't look to me as proof. When Abreu set up El Sistema in Venezuela he insisted that it was under the Ministry of Social Development, not the Ministry of Culture - it was never to be seen as 'culture'! And the rest is the most extraordinary story in the history of music.

One of my heroes, the vocalist Bobby McFerrin, was at Celtic Connections. There's no-one on the planet better able to make everyone feel that music, singing, and dancing are absolutely natural to all of us. And he'll get any of you scrabbling up onto the stage to prove it. He also relates the story of how his friend, Yo Yo Ma (another of my heroes), was in Africa 'sharing' his music. Ma was trying to copy down a shaman's song, missed a few lines, asked the shaman to repeat them, and the shaman sung a load of completely different music. 'No' said Ma. 'Yes' said the shaman - because a piece of music can only exist in one place at one time. The Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu was another 'must see' at Celtic Connections. I've been into Indian classical music as long as Western, so I couldn't miss him. His guests were the amazing rampacious Celtic trio, Lau, the phenomenally successful Norwegian soprano sax improviser, Jan Garbarek, and the Indian singer, Shankar Mahadevan. Indian classical music is rooted in intellectual rigour and virtuosity equal to anything in the world - and it's never written down - it only exists in one time and place. "At the outset, you think everything is segmented into classical music, jazz and all those other genres," Gurtu says, "But when you approach music in a more spiritual fashion, you notice that the spirit the music is built on is the same everywhere." I could hardly believe it when the Indians really got going, leaving Lau and Garbarek looking as though they weren't sure which end of the instrument to hold......and the Glasgow audience baying for more. You should hear Indian audiences at Indian music sessions - or at the CBSO's qawalli concerts, where the sound levels in the middle of the audience were measured to be higher than in the middle of the orchestra. I'm not suggesting that every musical event should end in this sort of celebratory riot, but it's possible that our communities, not to mention us players, should take this bus trip more often. Actually, we had a spectacular bus trip last Thursday night. If you weren't there, your life is the poorer. Christine Brewer singing Strauss songs......the audience looked ravished. The orchestra bristling to Donald Runnicles......what a buzz. A huge audience, plus players, staying behind for the coda.......Christine doing Burns songs, with Donald on the ivories. It felt more like a community event than I can remember. Unrepeatable.....except that some of our guys could jam along if you want a Burns Night sing for a Coda.

Talking about the CBSO, after four years absence Simon Rattle returned for two performances of Bach's Matthew Passion. The huge Symphony Hall sold out two nights in a row. (How many more nights could have been sold out?) One of the reviewers raved about the sense of 'community event'. I envy that. I wouldn't hope for a better complement. Mark Padmore, the inspired evangelist at that performance, talking during the interval, expressed what I am fumbling at.....squared: Engagement, Community. And, after many years in historical performance, he also is moving on - to a re-engagement in the present. "There was no performance tradition in Bach's time." "There was no maestro culture in Bach's time." I complained to Andrew Manze that, since I joined the SSO, the historical performance movement has robbed us of a lot of baroque repertory...."it's not what we should be doing". Well, here was Simon Rattle doing the symphony orchestra version - to packed houses. What would Bach have wanted.....here, and today? Something unrepeatable.....?

Donald Runnicles returned to Scotland last week to lead some fantastic concerts in Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh accompanied by the amazing Christine Brewer. As Donald was in town there was quite a bit of press action and the articles are listed below.

Over at The Herald Michael Tumelty gave the concert 4 stars and particularly enjoyed the post-concert coda featuring Donald and Christine (available to view here) saying that "After the official concert, Runnicles, on piano, and Brewer performed Burns, Britten and Bernstein in an informal set that teased the mind and broke the heart."

Blogger Tam Pollard at Where's Runnicles? commented that Brewer "has an excellent chemistry with Runnicles and the pair have collaborated to great effect both on disc and in the concert hall."

We're doing it all again this week in Glasgow and Perth with a programme that includes Mahler's Fourth Symphony featuring special guests in the form of young Korean soprano Ji Young Yang and Canadian violin virtuoso James Ehnes. It's shaping up to be another great week for Donald and the orchestra!

My last entry was about being struck by beauty, and the importance of natural un-amplified sound - sounds that entice us, rather than sounds that obliterate our sensitivity. Coincidentally, last week's New Scientist carried an article about profound emotions, starting the list with 'elevation'. There are some emotions that carry an obvious purpose - joy, anger, disgust etc - but there are others that are deep, that will affect what we do next, but don't initially seem to stem from some ancient survival instinct. We could argue about the what and why of those emotions....but not now. What about exaltation, which Rachmaninov searched vainly for in modern music? What about gravity, joy, ardour and apprehension.......when in our day to day life do we need that bunch? They're essential to a performance of Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead, according to Geoffrey Norris comparing recordings on Record Review last Saturday - typical of a composition that takes players to the physical and emotional limits. Schubert's deeply melancholic Wanderer Fantasy haunts this symphony - Imogen Cooper, a great Schubert interpreter, talks about music's purpose in bringing out 'forgotten emotions'. Re-awakening our shared humanity? Anyway, let's agree that elevation is the one that gets you feeling all choked up, tears welling, and you're not sure why. It's one of the biggies, and it's precious? This is the one I'm on about. Others trigger action - this one arrests you. Maybe this is a key to listening to Bruckner's music. Stopping. There is a way of listening where you've already decided to wait - you won't interrupt, you'll pause even when the other person has finished, and you won't move on to the next idea. You can choose to sit patiently with Bruckner, waiting in the dark while his sounds run their course, uninterrupted. His thoughts stand beside each other like masonry, separated, not flowing into each other. He talks - you listen. He stops - you stop. The key is to actively suspend your instinct for rushing on to the next thing - to rest while the emotional resonance of the phrase runs its course, like those sounds in the cathedral.

The crucial chemical ingredient in this symphony, and much of Bruckner's music, is the tiny semitone - as also in Schubert's Wanderer. This tiny step, particularly from the first or the fifth note of the scale, has a yearning quality - it tears at normality, despairing of being free - it leads away to excruciating dissonances, and is pulled inexorably back. The first thing you hear is the lower strings (that's me) grabbing out at the G flat above the rock base of F. At the start of the long slow movement the violins join in on the fifth note, sustained, full of almost inexpressible feeling, seemingly not daring to move forwards, then they gently press on the semitone above - quickly releasing it. I gasp every time I hear this. The phrases build up, layer on layer, striving for freedom, then die back in a hauntingly beautiful series of chords, to the sound of harps.....like feathers floating in the air, left by angels flitting from sight lest you glimpse them. The huge brass group join together in hushed choruses. You have to be in the hall to experience what this feels like. The building resonates - your body resonates with it - I feel suspended.....elevated......in a place that I never want to leave. By now, you'll have got my drift. There are surpassing moments of breathtaking beauty in this symphony - moments of choking elevation. The symphony may be long, but I don't want it to finish. Hear our broadcast, catch it on iPlayer, and listen everyday for a week. I hope you don't have to wait another thirty seven years to hear a live performance.....well, I'll be up there with those angels by then.

I learnt a lesson about stonemasonry during that particular performance in '73, a lesson which has lasted me through. It's exhaustingly hard work to play this music. Page after page of tremolando (very fast repeated bowing on the same note). Page after page of striding patterns - keyboard shaped patterns that are knuckle-crunchingly ill-fitted to orchestral instruments. Seizure is setting in, but the gaffer gives you more masonry to carry up those flying buttresses.....there's still pages to go. (Around the walls of Leeds Town Hall, where we played last Saturday, is a series of Victorian hortatory panels - and written right in front of me: Labor omnia vincit, hard work conquers all.) So, in the midst of this frenetic action it has to be possible, even necessary, to be able to rest - I don't mean stop playing, but somehow to release the tension in your arms, and allow the spine to expand - and be able to keep going. I learnt that this is possible - in the midst of the frenzy, it is possible to centre yourself - maybe to catch sight of the finished edifice.

Is all this worth it? If you're on this website, you won't need convincing. The healing power and value of great music, of great art, is contained here - inspiring lines of meditation that resonate long after the echoes of the music have died away. Would I volunteer to labour all night pumping those massive organ lungs for Bruckner while he did his meditations in sound? You bet.