What a treat to be playing the Elgar concerto with Yan Pascal Tortelier. He is a great conductor and accompanist himself, but what made it very special is that his late father, Paul Tortelier, was one of the greatest cellists of the twentieth century. Paul was the cellist who I first got to know and fall in love with as a child growing up in Sheffield where he played regularly, both with the Halle and in recital. I remember very well his wonderful spirit, wit and personality that, even to a young kid, just poured off the stage. I went backstage several times to get his autograph when only 9/10 years old, and remember vividly that on his cello case handle was an enormous wadge of airline tags - probably 30 or 40 of them in a great bundle, and I thought that was really cool. I also saw him playing trios with his son playing violin.

So it is a rare pleasure and honour to now be making music with Pascal. He has his father’s charisma, and a wonderful sense of who he is as a musician that makes it fun to work with him.

It’s great to be back here. Somehow these trips are always extra exciting: being back here reminds me of the last time I was in Melbourne, 2 years ago, when I arrived in a mobile home after a 3,000-mile trip through the outback from Brisbane - fantastic! This time I’m here for a week at the Australian National Academy of Music, locally known as anam, and then some Elgar Concertos with Yan Pascal Tortelier and the Melbourne Symphony.Last year anam was controversially stripped of all its funding from the government, and faced closure until a huge international wave of pressure forced the government to reconsider, and it is now enjoying a well-deserved surge with the brilliant composer Brett Dean at its helm. I was truly delighted when Brett asked last year ‘could you just take the building over for a week?’. Er, Yes Mate! After a recital, a masterclass and a lecture, the highlight of the week is a performance with most of the students where we’ll occupy practically every space in the building playing improvisations and pieces we’ve devised during a week of workshops. The audience will roam around, then there’ll be a brief still point with everyone in the magnificent main hall, before we all process over to the bizarre and unique Butterfly Club, one of Melbourne’s hippest venues, opposite anam, for drinks, talks, and maybe a bit more entertainment. Australis has a very New-World-Yes feeling to it, where these kinds of projects can just happen….I feel at home here!

Today saw a wonderful performance of ‘Journey’, a new piece written and performed by 21 music students from schools in Abu Dhabi, and three of the members of Between The Notes. One of our students had brought along an Arabic song that we particularly liked, and we used fragments of it to seed a new, 20 minute, work; taking those fragments, the young musicians wrote there own melodies, bass lines and rhythmic structures, and the piece grew from there. They have been a real joy to work with, and the concentration and atmosphere in the concert were just fantastic. For us it was a new experience to work with the Arabic scale, and it was very interesting, producing some great tunes and harmonies. I hope we get the chance to work in this way again with Arabic music, as we loved it!

I’ve just arrived in Abu Dhabi where I have a kind of residency for a fortnight - doing a solo concert, one with Between The Notes, and also visiting various schools and colleges and helping the festival to coordinate all their education activities.

The festival here is looking very exciting, with Angela Gheorghiu opening tomorrow night, and all sorts of interesting artists coming over, including Karim Said, a fantastically talented young Lebanese pianist, and Naseer Shamma, the great Iraqi Oud player.

As part of the Between The Notes project, I’ll be working with a group of local young musicians which will be interesting - I have no idea what they’ll be like, or where from, or anything!

The recital programme is all the Bach solo suite preludes, interspersed with improvisations on my electric cello - probably the first time an electric cello has been here. Just did that programme for the first time in some French churches last week, and it’s very enjoyable to play; like an hour of meditation.

Julian and I have just done three of our concerts that were scheduled for last year, but I had to cancel due to my injured shoulder. We put in a lot of work, and had a ball on stage. In the first half we play separately; me playing all of the preludes from Bach’s six solo suites, and after each one Julian improvising a response - something that might be daunting for a lesser musician, but that Julian did with consummate skill and sensitivity. In the second half we played pieces by Julian as well as by John McLaughlin, Jaco Pastorius, Antonio Jobim and Ravel, with a lot of improvising thrown in, and generally enjoying ourselves a lot. We had three full houses in Oxford, Sheffield and Nottingham and they were wonderful audiences, who really entered the spirit of the collaboration. One in London in a couple of weeks, and then into the studio to record a CD that will be released on Signum in September at Kings Place