Take the issue of the selfishness, or otherwise, of committing suicide. This is one of the signs of a true composer - and this he learned from Bach That is why my programme starts as it does.". YOU SHOULD think twice about dying anywhere in the vicinity of Wendy, the feminist artist at the centre of Simon Smith's new comedy. Having drawn her father drooling on his death bed, she skipped the funeral but had his cremated remains turned into powder paint which she mixed with her menstrual blood and used as the medium for her "abortion pieces". Symbolic, or what? Now Wendy's aged mother is fighting a losing battle with cancer and if you were her you wouldn't like the way Wendy keeps eyeing the large aquarium she just happens to have moved into her apartment.

It's more than 20 years since the estranged pair have seen each other, but Wendy has just returned to her Nottinghamshire birthplace to create a piece of public art on the subject of the burgeoning spirit of Wignall womanhood. Smith has a smart comic line in serene bad taste and Jonathan Church's attractive cast pitches the cheerfully dubious material in just the right bright, semi-knowing manner. "I love most his aspect which is least talked about - as a Classical composer. He wasn't an inventor of form like Haydn and Beethoven, but you don't need to be to be great. Most of his pieces - even the Scherzi and the Ballades - are variations on a very simple form. And though sonata-form was not his strength, his B minor Sonata ranks with the greatest."Quite apart from the beauty and poetry of his music, what I love is the sheer precision.

Unlike composers who think it's enough to fill the spaces between their beautiful harmonies, Chopin never loses his contrapuntal voices, even when they're very intricately interwoven. "At that age, and for the wrong reasons, Chopin seems infinitely closer to one in spirit than Beethoven or Mozart." She became intrigued by his complexity, but was also put off by what she saw, and still sees, as his periodic flashiness. Then she went in a different direction, and for 20 years didn't play him at all."But I had a lot of him in my pocket, and that's why I'm glad to play this concert at the Royal Festival Hall on 17 October [the anniversary of his death]." Her programme will be unusual, beginning with a Bach suite, ending with Chopin's Third Sonata, with carefully spliced studies by Chopin and Debussy in between. The Hungarian is a demon; the Pole is an angel.Honore de Balzac, novelistMould the key with a velvet hand, and feel the key rather than striking it Sing with the fingers.