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Silences, in the last movement of the Chin cello concerto, are ruptured by orchestral karate chops. The soloist scuttles away, to return, stabbing at the orchestra. Did you hear this piece? Most of us found it baffling, or worse. So full of such extreme difficulties, it felt unreasonable and alienating. But we did finally get our hands around it (most of it), and seeing it again on iPlayer, I began to feel, "Yeah, this is special". I hope other cellists will take up its extreme challenge. Two composers (following the score) were doing the ´óÏó´«Ã½ 4 commentary from the box at the side - a bit like the- one of them mentioned how incredibly accurately we played the text. Thanks. Well, there were several passages where no-one in my area of the orchestra was playing anything like what's written. Density and complexity render notes into meaningless gobbledygook - the incomprehensible mish mash is the gesture. That's just a fact. It doesn't detract one iota from the value or impact of the music.......your judgement will assess that value.

I've asked this question before: How do you 'play' silence? Dramatic pauses. Stasis. The sound of your final breath. What gesture will 'look' like silence, rather than like a useless actor hamming it up (that's me)? Every action needs a preparation, a backswing, so you can't sit absolutely still, especially if the next chord you have to play is going to be a karate chop. Fortunately, the Prom audience are fantastic with this sort of thing. Quick to tune in, they do silence - 'they're totally up for it' (to quote our trumpeter, Eric Dunlea), up for whatever is going to be thrown at them. Talking about fantastic, I can't imagine any conductor agreeing to do an incredibly difficult concerto premiere in the same programme as The Rite of Spring (not to mention La Valse) with the soloist taking the massive risk of playing from memory. But Ilan did. Completely relaxed....wandering around with his daughter in his arms five minutes before curtain up, then hanging around chatting at the artist entrance during the interval. Beethoven Nine, a couple of nights later, must have felt like a rest cure for him! Blew my mind. Maybe he was looking forward to the fantastic bash he gave us after the Beethoven, to mark his last concert as chief conductor. That level of confidence and mutual trust has to be symptomatic of a good relationship. I've got more 'fantastic' to rant about: this set of Proms is the best we've ever had. Music to get our teeth into. The Birmingham choir sung us off the stage....nearly. And, as usual at this time of year, all mixed in with exciting stuff in Edinburgh.

Philip Glass and Beethoven Nine ring up one of my leitmotifs: Simplicity. I've always had trouble with minimal music. It can be a nightmare to play - pages of repeating doodles, inserted with tiny variations to trap your concentration. Is this stuff just a cheat? Malcolm Arnold was conducting us in a programme of his own music - he seemed to feel the need to apologise for it, and with disarming intensity said, "When you're stuck for words, desperate to express something deep, you'll blurt out something devastatingly simple." Anyway, I was won over by the Glass violin concerto and Toltec Symphony. He has a massive following, many of whom turned up to this late night Prom, unaware that he'd be there. They (that's you, the massive following) can't all be wrong - and I duly got the message. One of my heroes, Jordi Savall, said, "Musical power is not dependent of size or complexity". So, what is important - could it be the mood or the story? The mood and the story of the violin concerto struck me as uncannily like the Sibelius. Is that sacrilege? The comparison is not the point, but I bet more people know and love the Glass than the Sibelius. Gidon Kremer playing it seemed the embodiment of the lonely soul wandering across an alien landscape. Maybe I shouldn't try to articulate these profound images and moods, because, like myths, they grow amongst the deepest roots of our psyche - pre-verbal experience common to us all. We all already know the story. Cerebral complexity is fine, if that's your thing, but for the majority of music loving folk it's just distracting or irrelevant. I'm mindful that 'posh' classical music represents only about two percent of the musical planet - and that statistic only considers the commercial bits, ignoring all the real live stuff going on out there in the jungles.

So where does Beethoven's ninth fit in this? Should we go and play it in the jungle? Is it a cerebral irrelevance? What's its story? Is it in the notes? Is it in the gaps between the notes? (Debussy said, "It is the silence between the notes that makes the music") Is it in the moods and inspiration that you and I will bring to the performance event? That famous mysterious threatening opening. Phrases keep climbing - only to collapse, despairing. Here, the story is in the mood - restless and constantly searching. Something is wrong - something is calling us to find it. Each of us knows that mood. Each of us already knows that something is deeply wrong, both within us and in the world. Near the end of the first movement the horns sound out. A clarion call - but for what? They don't have the answer....yet. The second movement storms forward angrily. Each of us knows that anger. Stopping occasionally for a pastoral dance, we are forced onwards again and again and again - so many times that we, the audience and players, might get impatient - which leads many conductors to cut out repeated sections. Each of us knows that impatience - the 'OK, I've heard you, and I'm not going to do anything about it' feeling. Then the third movement - a sublime meditation. Repose and space. But the clarion call returns. This time followed by a disturbing groan - a weird out of place chord - challenging everything, undermining the status quo. The last movement - memories from earlier in the journey thrash around like angry spectres. And then the miracle: something unutterably simple - the famous tune. One of the greatest geniuses of music offers us one of the simplest and most memorable melodies ever written. Did he know what he was doing? Could he have imagined that this would become a universal anthem of humanity?

What if he had put this tune into one of his late piano sonatas? What if he had put it at the beginning of an early piano trio, for nice middle class families to play of an evening? Compared to the great soaring melodies of a Puccini or a Qawwali singer, this tune is an underwhelming statement. It has emerged after long searches down dark twisting alleys of emotional and intellectual complexity. And, would it have meaning if it wasn't set in the context of such a huge gathering of forces? You, and the person sitting beside you, give it meaning, by being there, by being one of the multitude of walk-on extras! And then, just when we are congratulating ourselves on our intellectual appreciation, he crunches his point home - the sweaty peasants come crashing in. All hell (or heaven) breaks loose. Would any self respecting peasant risk being heard uttering Schiller's effulgent words? Are the words weightier than the Toltec text in the Glass? I wonder how much of the power of the music is in the power of our shared longing for Brotherhood. Words divide us - our unvoiced yearnings unite us. The tune summons that yearning up into the daylight. At this point in the symphony many commentators, including my revered piano teacher at college, accuse Beethoven of losing the plot: What's with this distant farting on the contra bassoon, and the peasant march? I'll tell you: This farting is the summation. This fart is Beethoven's last word. This farting heralds the climax of the story: 'Brotherhood' means everyone on the planet. No less. No exceptions. (Should a genuine 'authentic performance' be only when all tickets are free, and first come first served for the seats?) The ignorant poor interrupt our comfy middle class musings. Merely by uttering that phrase, 'the ignorant poor', I've pushed myself out of the real world! See? See how words divide us. See how music, working deep in the moods of our psyche, can unite us. What will be my statement? What will be my meaning when my words have ceased? What will be my talismanic remnant? Maybe I'll be having a quiet pint with that old Toltec guy. He'll look at me silently, his eyes asking me if I understood. And I won't say anything.