‘‘PERHAPS YOU MIGHT LIKE TO HEAR the rehearsal”, said the voice from a house in Teplitzer Strasse. It was 14 November 1987, a gloomy Saturday in Berlin, and Simon Rattle was about to stand before the city’s fabled orchestra that evening for the first time, to conduct Gustav Mahler’s sixth symphony. “We could meet at the Philharmonie, if you like.”
The speaker was Peter Steiner, a cellist in the orchestra, who had befriended a music-loving acquaintance of mine at the Edinburgh Festival 30 years previously. “If you’re going to Berlin,” said Arfon, “you really must meet Peter. He’ll see you right.” He did, that day and often thereafter. How much I owe to that fine man, through whom I got to meet many other members of an orchestra I have heard more than a hundred times. Fewer experiences than we suppose change the course of a life. That meeting with Peter was one.
Before he died in February 2003, I found out just how remarkable a life he had lived, and how modestly he wore his colours. Born to a viola-playing
