I'm in Vienna at the moment, and have just come from a lunchtime concert by the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Rostropovich, in the Musikverein.

Good God. I have never heard a sound like it in my life. I thought I knew what people meant when they talked about the sweetness of the VPO's sound, but I didn't. However good they are when you hear them abroad - and, like all orchestras, they have their off days (what were once referred to by a former leader of the LSO as 'mortgage concerts'). But hearing them in the Musikverein is something very, very special.

Everything about the acoustic is, literally, astonishing. The most amazing combination of lightness, delicacy and immediacy. The clarity is breathtaking. And yes, sweet!

It makes you realise how bloody awful our halls are.

(The concert was Shostakovich's 11th Symphony and the Tchaikovsky's 1st Piano Concerto, with Yefim Bronfman, who was good but LOUD).

One other thought, which has dogged me since I arrived. I can't help thinking that every third person I see is a Nazi (OK, fascist, to be pedantic).

There. Got that off my chest.

What I mean is that there is an enormous number of very elderly Austrians at the things I've been doing. Now being elderly and Austrian is hardly evidence of Nazism, but it is disconcerting if you're Jewish when you can't help but wonder what they did and thought during the war.

Add to that rather unseemly thought the fact that a very large proportion of them, and their younger fellow countrymen, voted for the Freedom Party, and it feels very, very odd being here. Many of them didn't want me to be born, and the younger ones who voted for the Freedom Party think I shouldn't be here either.

But hell, they have a bloody good orchestra.