It has been wonderful to return to performing programmes specially chosen for friends and familiar festivals in the summer. Our delight at revisiting some of our favourite songs and duets by Stephen Sondheim was bittersweet though. Quite apart from the headache of having too much wonderful material to fit into an evening’s programme, the whole event was tempered by news of Sondheim’s death at the end of the previous year (just as we were beginning to plan).

Nonetheless, we were delighted to come together with an enthusiastic and knowledgeable audience in Thaxted on 2 July for a mixed programme of Sondheim’s erudite, grown-up and occasionally naughty lyric art. We already have plans to return with songs by Cole Porter next year.

Postscript: We repeated the programme at the Club for Acts and Actors, Covent Garden a month later. It was lovely to bring this programme home to the West End with Stephen Dickinson, where I and baritone Paul Sheehan spend so much of our performing life!