The Music World circa 2019

In the early 1950s, my family in the south of England was visited by two Aunts from The North (my father had seven sisters, and five brothers). The aunts were happy to hear that their young nephew liked music, as did they. They asked me to play something I liked, and I put on my current amour -- Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert songs. They listened intently and then, at the end, one of them said: “Eh, he sings very well ... for a foreigner”.

On my return from a couple of weeks in Vietnam a few days ago, I listened to Tianwa Yang playing Brahms. On a whim, I followed this up with Ning Feng playing Bach. And, this evening, it was Xiayin Wang playing Rachmaninov. I wonder what my Aunts from The North would have made of all of that. Before listening to Xiayin Wang, I consumed with pleasure my master dish: a Thai soup Tom Yum, with assorted fish. In 2019, we live in a different world (even in Brexit Britain).