The recent Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale explored various aspects of the string quartet format, including the many life lessons it offers us Four people whose lives are intricately entangled – musically, geographically and financially: not The Beatles or Rolling Stones, but your average string quartet. Rather than rock music and drugs, their lives revolve around arguments about bow direction, use of vibrato and how to interpret Schubert’s accents. Audiences may not witnes

The best musicians have special powers of listening, as pianist András Schiff demonstrated in a masterclass last week How can you tell if someone is listening? I mean really listening. Not semi-listening while they work out what to say next. Not mind-made-up listening. Not with their ears in the room but their thoughts on lunch. But genuine, in-the-moment, every-sense-primed, cold-bloodedly objective listening. What does it look like? After all, surely, to be a musician this

I recently interviewed Eugene Drucker about his Southbank Centre concert with the Emerson Quartet on Sunday, 16 November, which you can read about here. But he had so many interesting ways of explaining Beethoven’s groundbreaking and difficult Op.130 and Op.132 Grosse Fuge that I ran out of space, so here are some of the broader concepts he talked about, which didn’t fit the piece. Out of this world ‘Because Beethoven was completely deaf he had been forced to imagine and crea