This morning

Things are working once again around London, but in a low-key manner. The count from the attacks yesterday is 38 dead, 700 injured and a whole city traumatised.

My friends of the Razumovsky Ensemble are not going to find it easy to recruit an audience for their Wigmore Hall concert tonight, wonderful though they and their programme are. I am determined to get there. I am not going to be afraid. At 7.30pm I shall be in that hall and if I have to get on the tube, then get on it I shall. I refuse to let a bunch of thugs stop me.

And so to some recordings to recommend, as promised yesterday.

What can one do but reach for the Elgar? The obvious thing, I suppose, is Jacqueline du Pre playing the Cello Concerto - her first recording of it, with John Barbirolli conducting. But the Violin Concerto is more consoling, more reflective, and, to my ears, more beautiful. Try the classic recording by the teenaged Yehudi Menuhin, conducted by Elgar himself.

Alternatively, this next one is extremely good value: Hugh Bean plays the concerto and the violin sonata, and you also get the Piano Quintet, the Serenade, the String Quartet and the Concert Allegro with John Ogdon. Hugh Bean's tone is incredible. I once heard him performing the Brahms Horn Trio at the Wigmore Hall and when he began the tune, his violin sounded like the horn.

While talking British violin performances, I mustn't leave Tasmin out. Her recording of the Delius Violin Sonatas with pianist Piers Lane is fabulous. I'm a secret Delius fan. It doesn't always do to admit this, mysteriously enough, but I think he's GREAT. The Walk to the Paradise Garden is one of the most exquisite pieces ever written by someone who was technically British. Here's The Halle Orchestra with John Barbirolli.

A close-run second is Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending, recorded here by our Tazza.

All of this is, however, very English although London is today a tremendously multicultural place - one of the things that we're proudest of here. Multicultural celebrations are rare in early 20th-century British music, and for a recording that celebrates the little that there was, turn to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Violin Concerto which is both stirring and gorgeous in this recording by Philippe Graffin. Philippe is playing it at the Proms on 9 August and I find it absolutely extraordinary that it should be buried in a programme of British Light Music - since it is neither particularly light nor typically British. Classical music gets a lot of stick for consisting mainly of music by dead white men. The one time we're treated to some extremely good music by a dead half-black man, however, it has to be presented either as a rarity (by Hyperion, who recorded it with Anthony Marwood) or a trifle (by whoever plans the Proms these days)! Ouch. This recording takes it as seriously as it deserves and, as I've said before, is more than the sum of its parts, since it's the first commercial recording made in South Africa since the fall of Apartheid and features the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra which struggles valiantly day to day for its very existence.

Ultimately, though, for songs of love and fun and quality and British creativity at its best, there has to be the Beatles... and Revolver is my favourite album.

today

After the best day ever in London yesterday, today we have the worst.

We are all in shock, but there are a few positive things to say:

1. We will NOT be cowed by terrorists. London is, and will remain, the great capital city that it truly is.

2. The casualties are appalling, but we must be grateful that it wasn't worse than it is.

3. The emergency services have been marvellous.

My thanks to everyone who has phoned and written today - your concern is a signal of the solidarity we all feel in the face of such horrific and cowardly attacks on innocent civilians.

Chocolate heaven?

A couple of e-mails resulting from my comments about male & female rival visions of heaven raise a few questions. One lady in Lithuania is a tad confused because she loves Vilnius and dislikes chocolate. A friend from New York writes that his idea of heaven would be Bruges populated by leggy blondes, which sounds to me like trying to have your cake and eat it (or at least your chocolate)! But I suspect that Korngold would have agreed. His opera Die tote Stadt is based on a book named Bruges-la-Morte by the Belgian symbolist writer Georges Rodenbach - and there's no greater chocaholic in music history than dear old Erich Wolfgang K.

I'm wondering whether to change the heading on this blog to 'music, writing and food in London, UK'....

OH MY GOD

We got the 2012 Olympics!! This is ABSOLUTELY UNBELIEVABLE!!!

It could just be the best thing that has ever happened to London - this city is going to have to get its transport & infrastructure act together within seven years, and being obliged to do so is probably the only way it ever will.

It's wonderful to hear people on TV declaring that London's going to be the greatest city on the planet. As a kid, I was always convinced that that was the case; but through the 1980s, watching the place grow run-down, demoralised and neglected, it was depressing to feel that we were being relegated to what one well-known writer described during the John Major years as 'the bargain basement of Europe'. That's no longer true. Things have been on the up for some years now, speaking on average (there are, of course, still parts of the city which are horrendously deprived, including the eastern districts where the Olympics are to take place), but if this can't complete the transformation then nothing can.

The London bid seems to have succeeded not least because it talked about inspiring young people. The arts need to inspire young people with a similar world-class example - and in music, as well as in sport, it's only the combination of the finest practitioners, accessibility (not least physical accessibility) and solid media coverage that can provide it strongly and widely enough. Arts and music movers and shakers need to start thinking NOW about how we can join in most effectively.

Yum

One of the most interesting effects of performing is what it does to one's eating habits. Since we finished our little run of recitals, my chocolate consumption has reduced by 500%. Miraculous, but true. Does the chocolate produce the highs & lows associated with giving concerts, or does one eat it to forestall those dips in energy? (If the latter, afraid it doesn't work.)

I'm enjoying having my life back, as well as the healthier diet. Am cooking dinner for friends today, via my current favourite recipe book: Nigella Lawson's Forever Summer. It's a special treat to be confined to the kitchen late on Saturday afternoon because BBC Radio Three has jazz 4-6.30pm and I love Geoff Smith's Jazz Record Requests - there's always something wonderful or fascinating or rare, if not several of all three. So any guests who come over on a Saturday are more or less guaranteed a more elaborate meal than they'd get here during the rest of the week! ...oh well, so much for that healthy diet...

Speaking of which, here's a recent revelation about the nature of masculine & feminine alternative heavens. Apparently, for most man, the best alternative to heaven would be a place with an endless supply of leggy blondes (maybe this place?). Us girls think differently. Our alternative heaven has got to be Bruges: the town, I believe, that has the highest concentration of Belgian chocolate shops per square metre!