I'm now down to the last few preparations for next week's concerts and recording: a few tunes are flying around our email accounts. Must remember to prepare tomorrow morning's lecture at the RSAMD as well.

Sushil tells me that at the weekend he recorded Alasdair Gray's contributions to the album we played on in December. Can't wait to hear it. And on Monday Ruth Crouch came over for a preliminary rehearsal of the Bach E major sonata we're playing in the Queen's Hall on 6 March. I still have some practice to do; I don't like the feeling of not being as prepared as I should be. And I don't normally listen to recordings of pieces that I'm learning, but I might just invest in Pablo Valetti's new set of these with Celine Frisch: if it's anything like as good as the Café Zimmermann Bach records I'll be very impressed, and it will give me something to listen to en route to Quebec in a couple of weeks.

Very sad news of Martyn Bennett's death on Sunday night: a real genuine musician. I remember 8 or 9 years ago asking Dick Lee to record some stuff with Hamish Moore for Radio 3, to go out on Christmas morning. Hamish was troubled with RSI at the time so Dick asked Martyn, who I thought would bring a set of smallpipes. He showed up on a dark rainy December morning at Crichton Church with his fiddle and the highland (war) pipes, which under the stone vaulted ceiling, with Dick wailing away on soprano sax, made a deafeningly obscene noise. It was great. With the addition of Rick Bamford's percussion the three of them set about working out what kind of music would work in the space, and Martyn was always the one listening and tuning in to exactly what would feel right, rather than just playing. When the rest of us thought we were ready to record, he would still be standing quietly, thinking of something better to try, and he was always right.  

The last I heard from him was when I was a guest on Mary Ann Kennedy's show on Radio Scotland in September - she played the Seal Fisher's Song set from The Red Red Rose, and bits of Suzie's and Chris's albums, and a couple of days later I got an email from her that said 'saw Martyn yesterday and he was demanding to know what "that amazing music" on the show was last week'. We were all very flattered.