Letter: Musical memory from 1832

Musical memory

from 1832

Sir: Here is another long memory, further to David Ashton's letter (22 May).

In the late Sixties, I played amateur chamber music with Robert Platt, later Lord Platt, retired president of the Royal College of Physicians, who was also no mean cellist. He liked to tell the story that, as a boy in short trousers, he was taken to hear Mischa Elmann, then a child prodigy, play a violin concerto in the Queen's Hall. He was seated next to a very old gentleman, who said to him: "What marvellous playing - the best I have heard since Paganini!" Paganini died in 1840, but the last time he played in England was in 1832.

RONALD FERRARI

Trinity College

Cambridge