You should be able to hear my interview with Janice Forsyth here for a few days yet: click on Arts Show - Fri and I'm about 30 minutes in. And we got a nice review from Ivan Hewett on the Culture Show on Thursday: the other item reviewed was the Royal Opera House's Madam Butterfly, so we're clearly now an establishment presence. (joke)

I've been enjoying more Haydn as a happy audient: last night at the university the Festetics Quartet somehow managed to sound nothing like a string quartet at all: they sounded like four people playing Haydn's music. It was great. And then this afternoon Ronald Brautigam gave an absolutely stunning recital on the university's Paul McNulty fortepiano: one of those concerts where you come out refreshed and exhilarated. He finished with the final E flat sonata no.62 which really needs a big nasty English piano rather than a refined Viennese one - he pushed the instrument right to the limit of what it could do, and then when he came off he said to me, grinning: 'how to kill a fortepiano ...'.

But now I'm back at my desk tonight trying to clear its piles of paper again, listening with a flask of peppermint tea to a promo copy of the Ivor Cutler Decca re-issues, that was kindly passed my way this week. Sounds like it was recorded yesterday rather than in 1961 (and 1959).