So today I played in a Spires Music world premiere of Colin Touchin's Choose the Light. It was composed for the Coventry Mysteries and was inspired by the responses of many, many school children to the Doom paining in Holy Trinity Church, Coventry. It's a great piece, with material for school choirs, adult chorus and orchestra to all get their teeth into happily.

The interesting thing about Spires is they use professionals to lead the orchestral sections. This means the overall standard is impressively high. It also means I was sitting next to a very competent young man, and becoming all too aware of how incompetent I felt. Now that's not to say I played badly. I performed adequately, made very few slips (and none of them noticeable beyond my desk partner and myself) and generally acquitted myself professionally. No, what I noticed was how far my technical competence was from his. Ok, he's a professional. He's had high-quality tuition for many years (as did I, it has to be said) and he's clearly very talented and committed (the latter being something I always struggled with). But he had that ability to make it all seem soooooo easy.

It has to be noted at this point that I have been out of the playing game for several years. I've not played regularly with an orchestra since I moved to the Midlands in 2001, and I hardly touched my 'cello at all after I was ordained. Then, when I became ill, I fell out of love with it entirely and my 'cello sat in its case gathering dust. So it's only really been in the last few months that I have started to play or even practise again. It's not surprising then, that my fingers are a little rusty. But that's not entirely my point. I don't think that, even at my most capable, I was ever as comfortable with my instrument as this bloke. He had managed to eradicate all observable tension from his body, whereas I have a sore point on the tip of my thumb from gripping my bow, and I mean gripping. I'm fine in lyrical sections. My hands relax, my bow glides and all is well. But when the music becomes more impassioned, so do I. And as I've mused on this, I've realised there is a contradiction in performance. Musicians of every kind are trained to relax in order to perform at their best, just as an athlete needs to relax in order to compete well. But equally we have to express the emotional language of the music we are performing, and sometimes that music doesn't say "warm, fluffy clouds and marshmallow".

Clearly what I need to do is learn to disentangle my physical responses from my emotional ones. I need to be able to portray despair, anger, violence, melancholy, fear, surprise ... without it adversely effecting my playing technique. I understand the theory behind keeping relaxed. On a string instrument, as soon as you tense your bowing hand/arm/shoulder you effect the contact of the bow-hair with the string and it deadens the sound. The string is less able to ring freely, so you end up fighting against yourself to get enough volume. So I need to learn how to make a sound that is marcarto whilst having a right hand that's marshmallow.

Hopefully realisation is the first step ...