My daughter played in a cello quintet in a concert tonight. When practising her part at home she kept getting the rhythm wrong. Tonight she played it perfectly. I congratulated her afterwards on how well she'd played and that she'd got all the rhythms correct and she said "Oh well it was easier than at home because L. had the same rhythm in her part so I knew I could rely on her."

This sounds perfectly plausible except that L. had got lost after two lines and played nothing more until the final chord My daughter hadn't even noticed that L. had stopped playing (she had been listening to the cellos with the tune). Obviously just the idea of L. playing the same thing as her had given my daughter the confidence to be able to play.

Lovely to hear that your daughter played so well tonight.

It's very interesting about her rhythms. Perhaps she just needed to relax rather than worrying about them? Sometimes when you focus practice on a few bars where you have a hang-up it just doesn't appear to improve at all, but then if you play throught the whole piece and forget to get steamed up at the difficult bars, it just happens. The mind is a strange thing!