I am very lucky and grateful to have this living link to a past era, the violin presumably having much more history to it than the later portion that I know.

I thought that maybe it is not so much, as he seems to think, that the world loses interest in female performers after they hit a certain age, than the performers lose interest in the world.

Ergo, because of the money problem, it is probable that our orchestras will soon go down in quality.

However, the thought hit me that this was a pretty pathetic way to kick the bucket - being accidentally poisoned during a photo shoot, of all things - and I started weeping at the idiocy of it all.