Entertained by two fiddlers

Back to the Key Theatre yesterday - not been for 18 years and now I'm back twice in a week!

This time, we were to see cellist Julian Lloyd Webber and his wife Jiaxin. She may be wife Mk II or even Mk III, she's a good bit younger than he is. She's Chinese and they met (I guess) as two professional cellists.

The performance was those two, plus a pianist and the style was quite unusual. They played short pieces written for voice or other instruments, so it was more the style of a vocal recital, rather than a string quartet.

We were blessed with seats on the second row, right in the middle, so Lloyd Webber was pretty much directly in front of us. It's something of a privilege to be able to sit 12 feet from a world-class cellist playing a 350-year-old Stradivarius.

Some of the bow movements are so slow and precise that you can barely see it move and it glides from string to string almost imperceptibly. Their left hands were much busier most of the time.

The cello really is a beautiful instrument. It looks gorgeous, the sound it makes is sublime and the player has to embrace it to play it, so man and instrument become almost as one.

We had a terrific evening and the Key was pretty full. There were a few spaces, but not many. Julian Lloyd Webber had been wandering around the bar at the beginning of the evening (I think checking where he would do his CD signings after the show) and then couldn't get through the locked door backstage. He asked one of the young ushers to open the door for him and she asked him if he was part of the show. Classic - that's Peterborough for you Julian!

Update (8.5.14): We now realise how lucky we were to have seen Julian Lloyd Webber play. In the past week, he has announced his retirement from all performances due to a problem with his neck. It's a condition that has been getting worse and worse. Peterborough might not have been his final performance, but it was desperately close,