Last summer I was teaching on a European Chamber Music Academy course along with ECMA's artistic director, Austrian violist Hatto Beyerle, co-founder of the Alban Berg Quartet. One lunch-break, I wandered down to his teaching room to see how he was getting on. His students had gone for lunch and he was sitting alone in the hall, ruminating on the morning's class. ‘I constantly find myself thinking’, he said to me sadly in English, ‘that so many musicians today don't know how to begin. They start, but they don't begin.’

I particularly love these kinds of observations which might, or might not, arise from an imperfect use of another language. Or is it actually a more sensitive use of language than a native speaker's? In any case, it woke me up. ‘They start, but they don't begin.’ What could be the difference? In English, ‘starting’ and ‘beginning’ are used more or less interchangeably. It reminded me of Mr Habib in the film Father of the Bride who buys Steve Martin's family home and then orders a wrecking crew to demolish it. ‘Commence to start!’ he yells at the crew. We laugh because commencing and starting are the same thing in English – as are starting and beginning, you might have thought.