While at one of the Emerson's concerts last week I got chatting to the guy sat next me. "I wonder what sort of strings the viola player has?" he asked "As he has 4 fine tuners they could be steel".

I answered, I thought quite wittily, "well it's probably nothing to do with his strings, but because viola players have trouble tuning with the pegs" ...good viola joke I thought, and far more amusing than "Helicores!"!

"I'm a viola player" he replied :embarrassed smiley:

Hmmm...you never know who you are sitting next to do you??!!

Ooops!

Whoops! The Maxim site is looking great Jane How is Arch?

Moral of the story....don't tell viola jokes (from a violist )

Thanks...I have a lot to do on it now. I have got some photos (courtesy of a prof photographer) of Maxim playing the Cannone to go up, and I need to write up about the Masterclass from last week.

Arch is in bad books again. I bought a box of very rich, very expensive, home made fudge back with me from London for John. Guess what happened....

Well I suppose its my fault for leaving it out on the coffee table with an unsupervised dog in the same room who looked like he was asleep at the time. It's a wonder he wasn't ill afterwards.

Oh Arch!!! Did John manage to eat any of the fudge?

We had about 3 pieces each. It was so rich you couldn't eat any more at one sitting...well we couldn't!

Oh dear, naughty Archie...

And Janey Jane Jane, when will you learn?

Actually I was really impressed with Lawrence Dutton. He was a very powerful player and his viola sounded tremendous. I was convinced it must be a Gliga!

Brilliant.

What was he playing on it?

They played ALL the Shostakovich quartets over a period of a week. Fantastic stuff, but not for the faint hearted, it gradually got darker as they got nearer no 15.