My first trial week in Gothenburg has come and gone, and I’m back in beautiful Bergen, perched on my favourite stool at the corner coffeeshop. Overall, it was quite a good week… musically speaking, I enjoyed myself tremendously. Not only was the program beautiful, but I really got a kick out of sitting at the front of an orchestra again. In a perfect world, it shouldn’t matter where one sits, but the fact is that it’s so much easier to get carried away (in the best sense of the term), to feel involved in the music-making and to be emotionally invested as a section player when you’re up front in the middle of the action. It makes the job easier ten-folds. Not only is it easier to follow the conductor and concertmaster when you’re up close and personal, but it also becomes easier to buy into whatever it is they’re selling. And because at the end of the day, the success of a performance depends on whether the players are all buying into the same vision, it becomes easier to feel good about the work you’re putting out there. All of this good work was rewarded (twice) by a beautiful encore, performed by the conductor and soloist Christian Zacharias: a Rondo in C-minor by CPE Bach, of whom, if you recall, we were performing two works that week. His performance had me grinning from ear to ear… the piece is delicate yet dramatic, heady albeit humorous, (*groan… please forgive the entirely unintentional alliterations) and Zacharias’ touch is like nothing I’ve heard live before… the only thing I could compare it to, in its perfect, exquisite crispness, is that wonderful feeling you get when you eat sushi and a single one of those tiny fish eggs pops between your teeth…. yeah, yeah, I know, it all sounds a bit esoteric, but honestly, it’s the best analogy I could come up with.