Three chamber music collaborations

I've been to Berlin's Schoenefeld airport and back twice in the last three weeks for chamber music collaborations, the first with Nicola Benedetti in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern festival, the second with Alban Gerhardt and Viviane Hagner in the Berliner Festspeile. Then, at the weekend, I went down to London to rehearse some Schubert piano duets with Paul Lewis. Increasingly, I'm finding there is nothing to beat chamber music: concertos and solo recitals are wonderful and deeply satisfying in their own way, but making music in a small group of equals is more complex and subtle. A lot of it is down to personal chemistry: musical instincts come very strongly out of a person's character and I generally find that when I get on well with someone I also like their approach to music. So it is with all of these musicians I worked with recently.

I first played with Nicola last year and it was a great experience. To me, the to and fro of rehearsing as you try and work out a shared view of the music is as important as the concerts, and with Nicola this is a very stimulating process: she's flexible but also brings strong ideas of her own. For our concert in Germany we had a serious, challenging programme of Debussy, Prokofiev and Brahms, and we both wished we'd had more time to rehearse, but in the end the performance was pretty satisfying. She has the instincts both of a soloist and a chamber musician (she can 'take control' of the music and also respond very quickly when someone else does it), and that's a very nice combination to work with. After the concert there was something rather magical - a walk up a wide candle-lit path from the Schloss where we'd played to a schnapps distillery, where we had a wonderful meal and some of the best liqueurs I've ever tasted. Schloss Zinzow, if you're interested!

Alban I've played with many times and it just gets better and better. At the root of it, I think, is a real sense of trust that has built up over the years, which comes from a shared sense of musical and personal values, a similar joy in performing, and simply having a lot of fun together. Viviane was very easy to work with too, and did a wonderful job with the teacherous violin part in the Schubert Bb trio. After the concert Alban and I went to see Berlin's main football team, Hertha, get beaten 0-4, their 6th loss in a row. I'm not sure if Alban's more passionate about music or football, to be honest: I'm surprised he had a voice left at the end.

Finally, a day's rehearsing with Paul. We're preparing all the duet works from the last year of Schubert's life as well as a couple of sets of variations for concerts at the start of next year and then a recording on Hyperion. Neither of us had been able to prepare the music completely so we had a few Laurel and Hardy moments, but it was quite important to have this time in advance of the concerts - Schuberts duets often have the players' hands getting rather tangled up, so at times you have to slightly redistribute the notes. It's better finding out about these problems more than two days before the concerts! The great thing about chamber music is what you learn from your partners, and with Paul I'm fascinated by a captivating stillness which he can create instantaneously, a sense of complete identification with the music. Actually, I feel that a sense of stillness is one of the strengths of my own playing but the flavour of it with Paul is different somehow. I think Schubert is central to his musical identity and it's exciting to be working on these pieces with him.