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In our final festive concert, Christmas at the Movies, Liz played the haunting violin solo without amplification, and, in accompanying her, we players needed to listen, attentive and yielding, as she played without the help of a sound engineer cranking things up. Listening to each voice, creating space for the quietest - this cuts to the heart of why classical music is at the centre of In the cinema you'll have heard this solo in multi-track Dolby surround sound, played by Perlman, and though he certainly doesn't rely on amplification in live concerts, that cinema experience is as powerful as they come, even without the agony of the true story. Multi-speaker surround sound is now becoming standard in kids' bedrooms - they are learning to expect music to sound like this - instant gratification. Hearing this piece on Classic FM you'll hear it with its sound 'compressed' - with the quieter sounds electronically compressed up into a narrow and louder band so that the whole thing sounds punchier. Anyway, Liz played without any enhancement, and had me fighting back the tears. We played several barn-storming pieces in our three Christmas shows - I'd pick out the James Bond medley - the brass really getting to let rip, and all the violins searing at maximum heat. Visceral excitement. Stunning, especially if you're hearing a live orchestra for the first time. There's power in numbers. But what about those feelings that can't be, or mustn't be, shouted out - feelings and gestures that would be self contradictory if amplified?

In our second festive concert, Bill Bailey's bonanza Incredible Guide to the Orchestra, I found myself sitting right beside a (and it wasn't tethered). Another first for me. And he even managed to play the thing - which makes him more unique than we thought, and also puts him up there with Lenin as an amateur enthusiast for the instrument, if you can believe Wikipedia. Believe it or not, the theremin is played without even being touched - this has to be worse than coping with wobbling string pitches and sliding left hand positions. Bill Bailey was quick to point out that it will respond to any bit of your body that you can wave around in its vicinity. You'll be amazed how often you've had your spine tingled by a theremin, even if you hadn't a clue what was doing it to you. But still, it remains electric, requiring amplification, and that's what I'm on about for this blog. Incidentally, this show was sold out - over two thousand people in the Usher hall, paying twice the price of ordinary orchestral concerts, presumably many of them unfamiliar with live orchestral sounds, all of them enjoying an educational guide to the orchestra packaged in two hours of non-stop laughter - and one critic suggested the whole thing was a bit of a waste of time at the service of Bill Bailey's self indulgence. Was it? Getting back into my amplification track, the orchestra was miked up for most of the Usher Hall programmes. Projecting sounds out to the furthest reaches of a hall, especially for a new audience, is one thing, and it's important - but are there things it might it not achieve? If music only surges out at us, jumps rampantly on us inundating our senses, will we be deprived of the opportunity to discover something important - maybe something very important - maybe a more intimate and creative relationship with composer and performer? How many profound and moving works of art were never designed to leap out at you, to be easy or relaxing? Gazing and wondering, contemplating, giving time and respect, listening 'in', being puzzled, pondering enigmas - how important are these? The spiritual power in music reveals itself slowly. Why do we use the phrase: 'Beauty dawns on us'? Some composers were great minds and great souls - frequently inviting reflection, not setting out for impact and entertainment. If the music only ever leaps out at you, how will you learn to listen in, to discover beauty dawning? Another aspect of all this, and a sign of our times: We now accept as normal that audiences should whoop and scream. At worst, it sometimes feels like a need to mimic a typical children's TV audience, performing the 'audience act' regardless of what is actually going on, creating a compressed, hyped up atmosphere - acting out being wildly happy. Does this achieve what we want? How often would an audience's silence be more meaningful - especially at the end of a performance? Of course, I know something like that would have to be stage-managed, which would be self defeating - and, anyway, I'm the first to enjoy the intoxication of an explosion of applause. Of course, both are equally valid. And I'm not seriously suggesting that amplification, not to mention recording, hasn't exponentially increased music's reach and benefit.......I'm grasping at something different, something holistic, to do with overall balance - something to do with how amplification allows an effect to outstrip and detach from the performer's actual physical and emotional gesture - something to do with how packaging and universal availability seems to me to have failed to nurture a sense of value of the raw product.

There's another instrument that you'll have heard but not seen, probably many times: It's one of the most ancient instruments, effective indoors and out, hugely popular all over the Middle East, and is capable of profoundly evocative sounds. In our film culture it seems to have adopted the role of the lone voice, calling through the mists of time. It prowled around in Attenborough's recent Life series, . I'd love to see it featured in a concert.

I've spent a lifetime playing great masterpieces, wandering, not understanding, in the corridors of the greatest minds and souls - this has been a massive privilege - and at the end of the day, at the end of my day, I want the doors to these corridors to be alluring, to be inviting to wanderers. I don't want my children, or their classmates, to miss out on these things - I want them to gasp in wonder without needing to be cued to do so. For the last scene of Roger Scruton's ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Scotland programme, Why Beauty Matters, a quartet and two singers were plonked down in the middle of the shopping mall at St Pancras Station performing - and the camera wandered over the faces of passersby as they were caught by beauty.....priceless. How can beauty dawn on you, and cause you to gasp in wonder, if you've been primed and hyped to react? Great scientists, from Einstein down, have expressed awe of music's power. Perhaps the most important things in life are, by their very nature, vague and indefinable. The trouble is, we want things to be instantly gratifying, clear and defined, predictable and controllable - and once we've defined them, we can go on to argue about them, and even fight about them. It's the unseen, the unknown, the things that make us want to search - the things of which we are ignorant - which, like dark matter, have the most powerful effect on our lives. How can we encourage not-understanding? How are awe and wonder to be nurtured?