About twenty BBCM members enjoyed a magnificent concert given by the LSO with Mstislav Rostropovich at the Barbican. We heard Saint Saëns' Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Tchaikovsky's 'Variations on a Rococo Theme' and a piece written especially for Rostropovich on his 70th birthday by Sofia Gubaidulina, a composer whose early works were banned in Russia and thought 'misguided'.

The highlight of the concert for all of us was the last piece, a setting for a small choral group, two percussion, a celeste and cello, of a poem written by St. Francis of Assisi entitled 'The Canticle of the Sun'.

The atmosphere created by the continuo ringing of the Buddhist prayer bowls together with the occasions of near silence punctuated only by the percussion or cello took me, personally, back to a wood of tall trees where I spent a day alone in France. Hester envied Rostropovich's part as he was scored to play percussion, the saw and the cello. It was a concert we will all remember.

Helen Goodsell (mother of Hester, 10th year class)