Hello Dear Reader This week I enjoyed a phone call with a much-missed colleague Elena, from Switzerland. You can see my Swiss colleagues in this photo of my leaving party. I am sure she won’t mind if I talk about the fact that Elena just handed in her PhD, which I had the pleasure of helping to supervise when I lived in Lucerne last year. Elena’s PhD is entitled ‘Evaluating recorded performance: An investigation of music criticism through Gramophone reviews of Beethoven piano sonata recordings’. It is a fascinating study of music critique; how style and form has changed over nearly 100 years of written text. She breaks down the different components…