There snow business…

Its snowing once again. The roads are gritted and clear and life continues as normal in Munich. The pavements have so much salt on them I can feel my blood pressure rising just by walking on them. To be honest there is so much grit that despite the fact that I am walking on snow, it looks like ice cream full of chocolate chunks and has a unnerving grippy surface. Walking back from the restaurant, Chi, Tom and I try to skid along the main platz but are unsuccessful. These clever Germans have managed to take all the fun out of the snow. I think they may have used all of our grit supplies as well. In the main Rathausplatz, there is more of the stuff in a small area than Boris managed to find for the whole of Greater London. Where I live, on a hill in Surrey, the council never salted our roads, so to get to work we had to borrow some Maldon from the neighbours darling.

Anyway, it does look very pretty here; the beautiful buildings in the centre of town look like the icing sugar dusted cakes in the bakery and the warm and inviting cellars with their vaulted ceilings, roaring fires and local food and beer look especially tempting today. However, on this whistlestop tour of Germany, there isn’t enough time today-maybe after the concert…

The hall in Munich is interesting. Although it is quite reverberant, it isn’t always easy to hear what everyone else is doing on the stage-a bit of a problem. They have these plastic discs hanging above our heads which I think can change the acoustic a bit, although to be honest, I can’t hear any difference. JEG really uses these seating calls to try out different seating arrangements. Quite often, he will move the trombones from one side of the hall to the other because it sounds better. Last night he moved the horns closer to my section, and in Beethoven 4, Dave Pyatt was sat right next to me! I enjoy this aspect of working with JEG. He’ll often start the rehearsal with the overture and then jump down off the stage to walk around the hall to listen. Then he’ll jump back up and ask Andrew Haveron to jump down and have a listen. He hasn’t asked me to jump down yet though. When he is happy with the arrangement, we will often just play through a few bits that didn’t go as well as we would have liked and then we go off to get changed.

On this occasion I trot off down the road to the nearest Irish pub with Alan, our Irish stage manager to watch Wales (hopefully) beat the English. Being half Welsh and half English, I can’t really lose, but in all honesty, my shirt is always red. Its incredible how many rugby matches we end up watching abroad, I remember a very memorable match we watched at 2am in Beijing a few years ago. Alan and I have already planned to watch the final match of the 6 nations at midnight in a bar in Chicago-but today we are both singing from the same hymn sheet. Frustratingly, I have to leave 10 minutes into the second half when the outcome is far from decided, but I do really need to be on stage for the overture. I am promised the final score by text message as soon as it happens.

The hall is full, and I spot Anne Sophie Mutter in the audience and also Madge from neighbours, although it could just be her doppelganger. But its definitely Anne Sophie-better play well. After a quick chat with JEG about appogiaturas and stuff we take to the stage and launch into the overture and then No.4. This is one of my favourites although it has a terrifying opening where the woodwind and horns have to hold a unison B flat very quietly for what seems like hours. All goes very well and the audience really enjoy the energy produced in the performance. I really enjoy the text message that confirms the Welsh victory. JEG remarks that I now have a smile on my face and he now doesn’t! I guess the other half of his family doesn’t come from Wales then.

The second half of the show is our last performance of No.5 and the orchestra really goes for it. Next stop Leipzig.

Leipzig, when we arrive on the train still shows a lot of its East German past. The hotel looks like its in the middle of a building site, but the welcome is very warm. Just as well as its snowing again. The Gewandhaus is a modern concert hall with a long tradition and I really like the sound we can make. The concert is sold out and when i walk onto the stage it seems that everyone is wearing a grey suit. It is quite an intimidating hall as the audience is seated all around the orchestra. There are about 10 rows of seats to the side and behind, I feel a little like we are about to be fed to the lions. There is a little light relief however when Alan and Dan have a little trouble with the conductors rostrum. There followed a brief Laural and Hardy homage as they both struggled to get the safety bar from JEG’s box-he’s such a risk taker- and eventually they give up and Alan slams it back down onto the stage. The audience laugh and applaud them both and the tension is broken. There is a slightly tense atmosphere before we start the piano concerto as earlier in th rehearsal we discovered that it had been tuned to 444 which is much higher in pitch than we play. So much hand wringing and handbag bashing ensues and finally the tuner is made to bring it down to pitch! Its not until the end of the long first tutti when she comes in that we discover if he has done it or not. I feel like Han solo waiting to see if Obi Wan has managed to disable the tractor beam in Star Wars.

He did.

Anyway, for us the tour is over. We are now sitting in a very snowy Berlin airport for our plane which is already 2 hours delayed. I don’t know what time I’ll get home and tomorrow I have to be at the US embassy at 8am for my visa appointment and then the concert at the barbican. Maybe I’ll see you there, I hope you enjoy the Beethoven as much as I have.

Ich bin ein Frankfurter

Yet again ladies and gentlemen, I am writing this sitting on another train somewhere in Germany. I seem to spend a disproportionate amount of my time blogging on trains. I’ve finished my book and have yet to start the next one, Sue the shark is sitting with the vice chairman discussing all sorts of important stuff which I don’t understand, so I have a bit of peace and quiet. When we reached the Essen Hauptbahnhof this morning, it was snowing heavily. I guess it was my fault for complaining about the drabness of Paris, and as a Brit abroad, I feared the worst and waited for the announcements heralding mass hysteria, train cancellations and mindless statistics about snowfall. However much to my surprise, all the locals carried on as normal. There was already grit on the platform which makes me think that they actually knew in advance that it was going to snow-clever chaps these Germans. The train on the opposite platform arrived normally, and it was at this point that someone shouted that we were on the wrong platform. So all eighty or so of us had to rush down the not-slippery ramps and make a desperate dash for the train going to Frankfurt. We all managed to get on in time and provided some rush hour amusement for the Essen commuters. I held my breath though as I had already foreseen the ironic situation which I felt sure would ensue; after all the silly British people ran to get on the train, it would of course be canceled due to EXTREME WEATHER CONDITIONS!!! As the doors closed I tried to think of the one line which, despite our predicament, would reduce my colleagues to helpless laughter and forget the hardship of our situation. Imagine my astonishment when the train pulled smoothly away with absolutely no traction problems whatsoever. Doubly impressive given that before the train had arrived, I had quite clearly seen some leaves on the line. I thought that this kind of efficiency is the sort of thing that normally only happens in Japan, but it seems that German efficiency is also second to none…so sadly my hilarious quip had to be saved for another day of travel chaos. All I could think of saying was Vorsprung Durch Technik from those car adverts about efficiency. Roughly translated it means- You call that snow? You should see January in Mannheim.

Roughly.

Anyway, last nights concert went well. That is after we found the scores. Just as Carina was about to put JEG’s scores on, she couldn’t find them. JEG thought that he might have left them in his hotel, so superfit stage manager Alan ran to retrieve them. Thank goodness he is so fast. The hall in Essen is nice, but its another one where they leave the house lights on and we stare at you and you stare at us. I thought that the audience looked bored all the way through. It made me try and play even better, but they still looked bored. However as soon as we finished No 5 they all cheered and stood up to applaud. I guess they had a look of intense concentration on their faces and weren’t bored at all-they loved it. It is always a bit scary playing Beethoven in these parts though-long tradition you see.

The hall in Frankfurt is one of my favourites (I seem to say that a lot).Its a grand looking building which makes every concert feel like a real event. The foyers front of house are very ornate with big sweeping staircases and velvet curtains which exude faded glamour from a bygone era. Backstage there is a cafe for performers which has one of the most scary women in Germany serving. She can only communicate by shouting, Ja very loudly and to be honest, unless I am very hungry I use the chocolate machine in the corner. Its more sympathetic. As we finish the rehearsal, ushers shoo us off the stage even though we have finished early. They want to open the doors to let the audience in. So we all trundle off to the dressing rooms to get changed. Despite avoiding scary cafe lady and the stage sweepers, in the relative calm of the dressing room, every once in a while a very loud voice comes over the tannoy to let you know how far away the concert is.

“Ladies and gentlemen of ze orchestra, it is now 1915”

Concert starts at 8, so I’ve got plenty of time to get changed and buy some chocolate. A short while and one cufflink later, another earsplitting announcement.

“Ladies and gentlemen of ze orchestra, it is now 1930”

It may seem a bit arty, but most people like a bit of peace and quiet before the show. However with all this efficiency, there was no way we were going to miss the show with all these announcements going on. I was starting to think that I may have mistranslated Vorsprung durch wassisname. This was confirmed by the hoots of laughter at the final announcement before you go on stage.

“Ladies and Gentlemen of ze orchestra. It is now 1945”

Phew, thats a relief! The men in the bandroom cheered.

Basil Fawlty is alive and well.

Chez mon ou?

After C.S. lewis decorated my back garden last week, Paris seems rather drab. We arrived yesterday to a grey and miserable city, cloaked in a wet blanket of cloud; despite the travel nightmare which was last week in London, I began to long for the crunchy snow again. Still we are in Paris, its raining-but its lunchtime. So we head off to Chez Michel, an old haunt which my group of friends and I return to year after year. If you were to open a chain of French bistros in London and wanted every cliché in the book to make it feel suitably French, then you could do worse than copy the style of this place. It has a small menu and a killer set lunch served on small simple tables, the house wine is far better than most things you’ll find in a British restaurant. The walls are covered in old yellow prints of Paris, none of which hang straight and the the service is surly but efficient. Best of all, you can eat like a King for 30 Euros. Although in these times of apologetic bankers that doesn’t get as far as it did, its still pretty cheap. So, after depositing our luggage in the Hotel Terminus Nord we trudged to Chez Michel in the pouring rain and I began to imagine my onion soup steaming in front of me. Imagine the look of horror, dear reader, when we turned the corner and, sacre bleu, the sign said Fermé! Not a regular fermé though, it was a fermé final. The end of an era. The tables were stacked up and a pile of tablecloths lay unwashed in the corner. I don’t like to blame the financial services industry for spoiling my lunch in Paris, but it was raining, I was tired, so I did.

We did end up having a nice lunch in the end, so all was not lost, but all too quickly we were on the bus to Salle Pleyel for the rehearsal. In case you didn’t know, we are here playing Beethoven with Sir John Eliot Gardiner who I shall now refer to as JEG, time is pressing. If any of you have been to the concerts you’ll know how different the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) sounds with him on the box. I’ll be honest with you, its been a steep learning curve with JEG and the LSO over the last few years. Our first attempt at Beethoven was taxing as we were used to playing it in a particular way, lots of vibrato, plush sound and with a degree of reverence normally reserved for religious figures. JEG came along and blew all of that out of the water, he insisted that I play with no vibrato at all (although he does let me sneak in a tiny amount these days), and if he heard the slightest wobble in rehearsal, he would quite happily bellow across the room “Stop vibrating Gareth!” Thats not something thats been shouted at me very often. As well as the wobbling , the strings were asked to play starting with their bow on the string to change the sound of the attack, and the sforzandi are punched out like a championship boxer. Its all very hard work, but the results, for me at least were like a revelation. Beethoven 5, that most abused of pieces, is churned out more regularly than Only Fools and Horses at Christmas, and yet with JEG it becomes a revolutionary piece of music once again. Its like he’s taken a very dusty old painting that everybody is used to looking at and quite comfortable with, and blown the dust off to reveal details which had been forgotten about. Take for example the last movement, the piccolo makes its first entrance having sat for half an hour waiting. Normally you can’t hear its chirpy little runs, but JEG has thinned down the textures from a heavyweight to flyweight and Sharon zips through the orchestra like Ricky Hatton. Now that the sound is leaner, when there is a fortissimo or punchy accent, they really have a huge impact.

JEG gave a little speech in London about his feelings on the famous opening motif and its revolutionary content, you know the one. Da da da daaaaah. After being woken up by the tune on a mobile phone by commuting bankers (sorry guys) for years, I’d quite happily never play it again. However, the other night it was one of the most exciting things I’ve done with the orchestra for a while, and I suddenly realised what an extraordinary piece of music it is. Paris was no exception. JEG gave a speech again, in fluent French, and as he pointed out, they like a bit of revolution in France.

I feel exhausted after these concerts, they really are incredibly hard work, plus I have an ear infection and can’t really hear anything out of my left ear, which is just as well as Emanuel is coughing his lungs up and sniffing a lot. What a pair we are, his face buried in a hanky and me with a finger permanently stuck in my ear hoping that this prod will be the one that lets me hear again. I hope we make it through to the end of the tour.

As I said, its very tiring playing like this and we have had a very long day so we are very grateful when we get back to the hotel. Most people go straight to bed. Actually, some people go straight to bed. Maybe. I am persuaded to go to the restaurant under the hotel however. Its a cathartic experience really, and we go some way to laying the ghosts of Chez Michel to rest. Its got the same table cloths, the same surly service, even the same menu. As I tucked into my onion soup, I realised that after my second glass of Cote du Rhone, all of these bistros look the same anyway. We come back to Paris in May. I hope the credit crisis doesn’t deepen further, as unlike Chez Michel, this restaurant is right underneath the hotel. I didn’t even get wet.

Essen tomorrow.

Back on the blog

Although I am in Basingstoke today, I shall not be filling you in on backstage gossip as it isn’t really a tour. However we travel to Paris on Monday with Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Visit the site for regular blogs. If you are suffering from blog addiction then you might be interested to know that a few players and staff are now on twitter. Members will be tweeting on twitter all the time, not just whilst on tour. If you don’t know what it is go to twitter.com and search for us. Sign up and impress your friends with your intimate knowledge of the LSO, or just impress your younger friends with your techno savvy ability. But sleep safely in the knowledge that I will continue to provide you with my usual highbrow musical dissertations and discourse combined with pretentious musical analysis. Now where is my travel adaptor…

Coming home for Christmas

At long last we come to the end of a long tour and its time to go home. We left Tokyo after 9 days of rehearsals, concerts, sightseeing and shopping. In fact, several people seem to have purchased new, bigger suitcases simply to fit in all of the gifts. Fortunately my origami Christmas decorations (not a joke) don’t take up much room, so I am coming home with the same bag. We have a vast collection of luggage labels as well. There is the yellow LSO label, a Kajimoto management label, a bag number label, my own label with my name and phone number on it, a label from all of the hotels we stayed in which is about 6 I think and various bar code thingies from flights. My case has a serious identity crisis. Jo has a heavy label on his case, the identification tag of a serious shopper. We also get the labels from airports, those ones with the stickiest glue known to man which they wrap round your handle and you get paper cuts from when you try and remove them in the check in queue. I always like spotting them in airports as you can see where people are going. They usually have the name of the airport as three letters, Heathrow is HTW, Gatwick is LGW. The best ones though are funny foreign airports which then spell out words, my favourite is when we go to Madrid and the whole band is walking round with luggage labels which say MAD.

Yesterday we flew to Fukuoka, which is in the south and was warm enough to walk around in a t shirt in December. It is famous for its Ramen noodles which I can tell you are lovely. It was very pleasant wandering around the river in the sunshine before the rehearsal, but to be honest, I was packed and anxious to get on so that I can come home. Time can pass very slowly at the end of a tour, I’m sure my boys birthday cake is now finished and my wife has made a Christmas cake, and I know its a lot colder in England now.

The concert was a really good one, Valery was in one of his-lets try something different moods- and we all watched him like hawks because you simply cannot rely on the music being the same as the night before. Very exciting. The lack of soloist in the last two shows meant that Andrew Haveron looked a little more relaxed than the last concert in Tokyo. I wasn’t in the second half of the show,but when I heard the encore I made my way backstage to get my flute. As the orchestra was playing the march, I looked over and saw Valery standing off stage smiling from ear to ear! He had, it appeared started the orchestra and walked off ! I went over to him and said, “ There is a guy who looks just like you conducting in there.”
“Oh no there isn’t” he replied!
He went back on to stand the orchestra up for one final time.

Today we had a short flight across the mountains to Miyazaki. We looked at the mountains with some trepidation as after the show is over (the rest of the orchestra is playing No. 5 as I type) we have to get on buses back to the Hotel in Fukuoka, a journey of 3 and a half hours. We should get back to the hotel at 1.30 am ish and then we leave for the first of two flights home at 5.30 am. eventually we will arrive back at HTW at 1.30 pm on Thursday. Day off Friday and back to rehearse on Saturday at 9.30 am for six hours. Ouch, roll on Christmas.

This will be the last blog until the new year when we start a tour with John Eliot Gardiner and then more Prokofiev. I hope you have enjoyed it, I certainly have, but I’ll be very glad to see my (year older) children and my wife. I think the first thing we’ll do is buy a Christmas tree on Thursday night.

Every time I come to Japan I feel a little more at home than I did the time before. The people here are so helpful and kind and always make us feel so welcome. The Kajimoto team organise everything to the millisecond with an efficiency only the shark can get close to. I shall leave you with a little tale from Sharon which sums up a lot about this country.

Earlier on this week, she ventured out to an area of Tokyo that she hadn’t been to before. It said in her guide book that it was ultra trendy, so she simply had to go darling. Anyway, we got on the tube together as we were going in the same direction, we both bought tickets for 190 yen and parted somewhere on the Ginza line. I saw her later and asked how she got on. She had a lovely time being trendy and when it was time to go back to the hotel, she couldn’t understand the ticket prices, so she paid 190 yen again and got on the train. On the way back she got off a couple of stops earlier as she wanted to go to a shop that she had seen. She put her ticket in the barrier but it wouldn’t let her get through. She tried again but to no avail. The little man in the ticket booth came over and Sharon explained in her best smiley, shrugging, pointing way that the ticket didn’t work. The ticket inspector looked at the ticket and motioned that she should follow him to his office. There is a definite feeling here of civil order, people wait for the green man at traffic lights even if there isn’t a car in sight, so Sharon was a little worried. Lets face it, you can imagine the grief you’d get in London. Anyway, she went into his office and he took the ticket and tutted, he then wrote some things down and gave her back her ticket. He then reached into his till and gave her 30 yen. She had paid too much for her journey, and that is why her ticket didn’t let her through. Her ticket had a moral conscience. with that he motioned to the door, bowed very low and apologized for her inconvenience. Lovely.

Merry Christmas and a happy and healthy new year.

Gareth’s Classic FM moment

The LSO on Tour blog has hit the airwaves – Classic FM has interviewed our wordsmith Gareth for their daily podcast, and will feature more on the Japan tour in future podcasts. Listen, download or subscribe to it here: www.classicfm.co.uk/sectional.asp?id=17535

And while we’re on the subject of Gareth, you might want to pop on over to YouTube to check out the new YouTube Symphony Orchestra. The LSO is a major partner in this project, recording Tan Dun’s piece and recording video masterclasses. See what it’s all about here: www.youtube.com/symphony and watch Gareth’s flute masterclass here: uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uWkC7Aqztbo

I’m a celebrity…get me out of here

This blogging business is funny you know. To be honest, on a long tour, when we repeat quite a lot of music I get to the point where I am running out of words to describe the same piece again and again. The reason that you get lots of information that has little to do with concert giving is because it would end up sounding like those dreary match reports on a Saturday
“Yes well, it started off well with Gergiev steaming onto the pitch and gesticulating wildly. I can tell you he’s working up quite a sweat. This provoked the strings to really dig in John, I’ve never seen anything like it! The crowd went wild after the soloist really dazzled with dexterity and at half time there was all to play for, back to you in the studio…”

You get the idea. I don’t want to read that, so I figure you don’t either. If you want post match diagnosis, go and buy a paper.

I’ve already told you about Prokofiev and about Valery many times, and there are only so many train journeys I can tell you about. Then all of a sudden something quite unexpected happens and I have something new to write about. Yesterday was that day.

The first half of the concert consisted of the 4th symphony (first version) and the second violin concerto (only version), Vadim Repin was the soloist. I like the symphony, it has lots of great tunes in it which if I’m honest, I enjoy so much because I get to play them! Repin got a thunderous reception for his interpretation and was called back on many times until at last he came back on clutching some sheet music. This isn’t something I had seen before and there was a very quick stage move as both the front desk of cellos and Andrew Haveron quickly put up their music stands for him. They were all so keen to help that he suddenly had two music stands for his piece. It was at this point, that Repin stood Andrew up as if he was introducing him and they both stood up in front of the music. Just as most of us were looking at each other wondering if perhaps Andrew had been at the sake, the two of them launched into the second movement of the Prokofiev sonata for two violins. If you don’t know the piece, and I didn’t, it is a fast and very difficult piece which sounded like they had been performing for years together. Once again, the entire audience and orchestra looked on in awe at was was going on in front of them. It really was a highlight of the tour. Sadly I don’t have any photos of the event as I was on stage and also find it difficult to take pictures with my mouth open.

At the reception, I asked Andrew when they had decided to do the encore, he told me that Repin had suggested it the day before at a party they went to, and they had put it together earlier in the day. It is typical of his modesty that he felt the need to point out that he had played it once before. But I’m guessing it wasn’t in front of an orchestra and audience in a major concert hall with a famous international soloist. Simply breathtaking.

As we didn’t have to get up early the next day, a group of us decided to try out another traditional Japanese leisure pursuit-Karaoke. We headed up to Roppongi, which is a lot like Soho and booked ourselves a room for 22 people, thats 25% of the orchestra-ish. Earlier on in the day, some of us had bumped into a guitarist from Britain who was also staying at our hotel. He was over here playing with Craig David (If you are over 35 just google him-he’s a pop star dad) and said that they would like to join us later. We were very excited about being joined by a proper singer for our Karaoke bash and so we all warmed our vocal chords with a pre performance drink and started.

You’ll recognise the following phenomenon if you’ve ever been to Karaoke before. At first nobody much wanted to sing except for Neil and Tom, who were actually very good, and Helen was the biggest surprise of the night, she can really sing. But apart form that, everyone else had to be persuaded at first, but by the end of the evening there was a queue! Even Chaz from LSO live was there, blimey, underneath his professional veneer lies the dark heart of a rock god. Led Zep will never sound the same….well after a patching session anyway Chaz.

Every so often a ripple of excitement would go round the room,

“Craig David has arrived”

We all waited but he didn’t come, so we sang some of his songs instead. The duets were flowing as fast as the wine and I even had a go myself, we all seemed to be getting typecast, I was made to sing Delilah, th unofficial Welsh national anthem. Laurent sang La Vie en Rose and Miriam sang 99 Luftballon.

“Craig David is here”

No, still not here, just his guitarist. To be honest, I knew he wasn’t going to come, but we were having fun anyway. I stepped up to the mike for one last duet with Helen, who because she is a lot younger than me, didn’t know most of the songs that I knew. We eventually found that we both knew a Westlife song-don’t ask.

We were in full flight singing in harmony and everything when I’m told that Craig David did actually appear in the foyer. I discovered this when Mike came running into the room shouting “He’s here” over and over like a 12 year old girl.

We reached the climax of the song, I think we sounded great, well you do don’t you. Craig came into the back of the room and stood at looked at the cream of the LSO in full flight.

Then he turned around and went home. He didn’t even drink his drink.

As I finally lay my head on the pillow that night, I came to the logical conclusion that he was intimidated by my singing and felt it better to leave than show himself up.

Some people crumble when faced with joining in with great performers.

Thank goodness we had Andrew Haveron.

It’s a day off at last

We have now reached the half way point of our tour and it feels a little calmer now we are staying in Tokyo for a few days. It gives the orchestra a chance to stretch its legs, unpack its suitcases and most importantly, not spend every waking hour in each others pockets. Today is the first day off we have had on tour. In fact, I can’t remember when the last day off we had was, as the band was playing in the Barbican the day before we left.

Back home at Chateau Davies in sunny Surrey it is the birthday of my two boys. We had the party before I left for Japan, and very late last night we all marveled at the brilliant invention that is Skype. I chatted to them for two hours and we could see each other on the webcam too. We all agreed that it was fabulous and almost the same as being there.

But it wasn’t. I would give up a lifetime of days off in Tokyo to be at home today.

Still, there is no point in sitting around being miserable and it is the most beautiful day outside, so I caught the tube to Ginza and started wandering around to see what I could find. The main road is a bit like Regent Street in London except every spare bit of space is used. What looks like a department store is often about six shops piled on top of one another selling anything from musical instruments to womens underwear, apparently. I went into a cd store which also sells musical instruments, to have a look for anything different to the stuff we have back home. When you walk into a shop anywhere in Japan, the staff all bow and say, or more often shout a greeting which translates as “You are here!”. Its a greeting which you get in all shops and restaurants from the smallest corner shop to the largest department store. On this occasion, I was spotted as I walked in and the staff all shouted at me in unison like a chorus from a Greek tragedy. It made me jump, but their ensemble was excellent, you could tell it was a music shop. I went up to the third floor (more shouting), and found the cds. There were posters for our concerts, and seemingly hundreds of posters of Lang Lang, and quite a lot for Sarah Brightman (which we did the backing for funnily enough). I was looking for some old Rampal recordings which he made for the Japanese market years ago. Jean Pierre Rampal if you don’t know, was a great flautist from last century and he loved Japan. In fact Sharon has a guide to sushi in Tokyo which has a foreword by the great man himself. Bizarre! She is vegetarian.

Anyway, I found the instrumental recital section and started to look, there was a problem however. If you go into your local cd retailer in the West, all the cds are facing outward so that you can see the picture on the front. Now, in Japan they file them on the shelves like books in a library with the spines facing outward. All of the writing is in Japanese of course and so its a bit like lucky dip, I didn’t even know where the flute section was. I picked some out at random and came up with Orchestral Organ Fanfares, Japanese folksongs for the clavichord and a guitar cd of a German composer who I have never heard of. I never did find any flute cd’s and it was getting embarrassing so I left. More shouting.

Out into the bright sunshine once again, I was getting a little hungry, so I went to the Tokyo beer hall, a place I had passed many times but never been in. It was built in 1934, which makes it a very old building in Tokyo, and the inside is covered in mosaics of Japanese interpretations of German scenes. The ceilings are huge vaulted wooden structures which do bear a resemblance to the German beer halls it is supposed to resemble. The menu is a strange mix of Asian and Bavarian cuisine (Wurst and Wasabe with Miso soup on the side for instance) and about 20 types of locally produced beer. Most of the Japanese people in there seemed to be drinking a very dark stout, so I ordered one too. It was a bit like Guinness but sweeter and very nice indeed, especially when my seafood noodles arrived. There was German music playing, you know the kind of stuff, lots of accordions and oompah band stuff, except all of the singing was in Japanese. As my German isn’t much better than my Japanese, I still had no idea what they were singing about. All in all, it was a bit like when you have a surreal dream and wake up unsure whether it was real or not. I left to some more shouts, uncoordinated this time and stepped from the darkness of the beer hall into the bright sunshine.
I went to the Tokyo toyshop which at the moment is full of kitsch Christmas stuff-you can’t get away from it, even this far away-and bought a few bits and pieces for the kids. They always like it when I bring things back from Japan as I always manage to find something really weird. Today was no exception, although I can’t tell you what I bought as they do read this blog!

I ended the day wandering round Akhibara, which is known as the electronic district. In the daytime it doesn’t look too impressive, but at night it is a sea of neon, it makes Piccadilly circus look like 10 watt eco friendly bulb. The funny thing is that most of the signs are adverts, but apart from the obvious electric companies signs, the rest are in Japanese and consequently are rather beautiful as they can’t sell me something if I don’t know what it is. Probably. I spent a couple of hours just walking and watching until my feet started to hurt and I went back to the hotel.

By the time I got back from dinner, it was time to phone home again and see how the birthday boys were. Of course, by this time it was the afternoon in Surrey, and they had eaten cake and generally been spoiled. My inlaws were round, my parents had gone round and my brother was going round later. They all said how fantastic it was to be able to see me on the computer screen and how it was almost like being there.

But it wasn’t.

A day off in an exciting far away city, lavish receptions, the best concerts of my life. But today what I really want is some birthday cake.

Happy Birthday boys, see you soon xx

All photographs Gareth Davies except Fuji by Chi Yu Mo

The Winner of the competition is………

Japanese shop, but what does it sell?

Good Morning everyone. Its nearly 10am in London, but 7pm here. Thanks for all your comments, keep them coming in, its good to know what you think. Important matters now.

So I expect you are all wondering what the shop sells and who has won the complete set of LSO live CDs ?

Well, I can tell you that the shop in question doesn’t sell sushi, or golf clubs, or hip hop records.

It sells the winning combination of stringed instruments and vegetables!
Yep, I guess the owner saw the genetic link between the two.

Surprisingly nobody got the correct answer, I am shocked at your lack of imagination.

You can still buy the cds though or download them off iTunes. I’m listening to the new Sibelius with Colin at the moment, Marvellous.

More blogs later today-find out what I did on my day off.

Go to go, I have a concert to play in.

This way, this way, that way, this way, this way or that way…

Bliss, another train journey on tour uninterrupted by Sue, although Michael and Siobhan sitting across the aisle are getting quite noisy and competitive playing bubble breaker on her laptop. We are currently on the Shinkansen train to Tokyo traveling unbelievably smoothly and quickly. You probably know it best as the Bullet train, and it certainly lives up to its name. The front of it is aerodynamically shaped so that it looks like the lovechild of a train, a space shuttle and a mutant duck, and when they shoot through the station at full speed the sense of harnessed power is awesome.

Today, we are on the 9.26 train. Now any similarity between a train journey in Britain ends at this point. It glides into the station and the doors open for around one minute. If you don’t get on in the allotted time you get left behind, because of this our cases have gone on in a lorry so that we can get on quicker. The carriages today are double deckers and we are of course on the lower deck, the eye level in your seat is level with the platform. It is incredibly clean, all the toilets work and the staff are polite, as I said, no similarity with British trains. As we pull out of the station we accelerate at incredible speed and the only thing that isn’t a blur is the mountain ranges and Mount Fuji in the distance.

Every time I come to Japan (this is my 6th time) I am astonished by the efficiency with which it is run. I know it is a cliché but everything here really does run like clockwork. All the trains run on time, everything is clean, the concert halls, even in out of the way places are spectacular and put most of the halls in Britain to shame. When I was lost at the station earlier in the week, a young lady from the railway company asked me if I needed help in perfect English and then proceeded to help buy the correct ticket, and took me to the platform and made sure I was sitting in the right seat. As someone who is used to the begrudging monosyllabic grunting that passes for customer service in Britain, I was quite astonished. The people who shepherd us round Japan are from the Kajimoto Concert management company, if they were allowed to run countries I am convinced that they would end world hunger in a flash, although they would be less vague than I, they would probably end it on Monday at 9.23 am GMT. From the moment we arrived here and were greeted by a smiling face and an LSO sign pointing us in the right direction, we have been looked after like royalty. When were in Sapporo earlier this week, we actually had to walk from the hotel to the concert hall unaided! They were obviously worried us getting lost on the way, so one of our guides sat in the hotel foyer and showed us which door to go out of to get to the concert hall-there are two doors you see. I walked a few yards to the edge of the hotel grounds and found an LSO logo on the lamppost with an arrow pointing left. I turned left. As I did so I could see the next LSO sign on the next lamppost, it said straight on. I went straight on. When I reached this sign I began to panic, it was a pedestrian crossing which I had to negotiate on my own, fortunately I could see another LSO logo on the other side of the crossing. I crossed. Now this next sign had the logo, and two arrows, one which pointed left and the other pointed straight ahead saying, “Slippery way”. Faced with this sudden test of initiative, I decided to live dangerously and go the slippery way. It was indeed slippery. At the end of this road was-you get the idea-a sign with the logo, it told me to turn left, I could see the hall now. I turned left and was greeted with another sign telling me to cross the road followed by another one to tell me to go straight ahead. When I reached the stage door there was another sign telling me to go in and even more signs inside showing me where the dressing rooms, stage and toilets were. By the time I had finished my walk to the hall, my eyes were exhausted.
The journey took 3 minutes. Brilliant. Funnily enough, I saw them taking all of the signs down later on that night once we were all safely back so as not to leave a mess in town. Don’t think I am poking fun at this, well, not too much, they really are wonderful and I know that there will be times when I will be very thankful for one of their signs when I go out of the wrong door!

When we went on a train earlier this week, one of my friends left their mobile phone on his seat. Back home, you would have simply cancelled the number and replaced the handset as the chances of it being recovered were slim. On our return journey we went to the information office and filled in a form not really convinced that we were even filling in the right form or not. It took us an hour to get back to the hotel and on our return there was a message for us at reception. The phone had been picked up, handed in and would be delivered to the hotel at 10.30 the following morning unless we needed it earlier in which case they could bring it over tonight. Incredible. I expect they’d topped up his credit too.

When we arrived at the hotel yesterday, Miriam was presented with a letter from the previous hotel which consisted of a list of items left by mistake by members of the orchestra. I won’t bore you with the entire list but the summary really shows you the attention to detail in this country.

Left Articles in LSO Rooms

1. 1 Jacket
2. 5 Coins
3. 1 Eurostar ticket (Used)
4. 1 Paper cup
5. 1 cleaning cloth
6. 1 nightgown from unknown room cleared up with sheets by mistake

What a brilliant place this is!

By the way, we did a concert last night as well. I took some pictures for you. Hope you enjoy them.

Lost in Translation

There is a prize of a complete set of LSO live cd’s if you can guess what this shop was selling. Leave your answers in the comment form by Tuesday 3pm GMT and the first correct answer wins! Many thanks to the horn section for this one!

Shop in Japan

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