I very much enjoy the radio manner of regular BBC Radio 3 classical music presenter Rob Cowan.

Radio 3 presenters have recently taken to swooping up and down with their voices, in a manner which suggests that they have been on a course and that one of the headings was "communicating enthusiasm". I find this somewhat annoying. But Cowan needs no such voice making-over, because he has always talked enthusiastically without having to be told. (I even met the guy once, in Gramex, one of my second hand CD haunts, and he was just as nice in person as he is on the radio.) I therefore find Cowan a pleasing rest from the rather forced excitement of the other presenters.

I now have another reason to be grateful to Rob Cowan, which is that on Sunday morning he introduced me to an entirely new piece of music which I had never heard before, and which I liked a lot. (Usually with music on the radio, I either don't want to own it on CD or I own it on CD already.) The piece is by the nineteenth century composer Robert Volkmann, his Serenade No 2 for strings. It sounded really good. Happily I recognised the name of the conducter he mentioned, and was able to find the CD on the Internet. I insert the cover of this CD into this posting mostly for my own convenience, to remind me to keep an eye open for it in the second hand shelves, and to see if it might even be cheap enough to buy brand new.

I see that Volkmann also wrote thought good enough to be worth recording, including some piano trios. I have loved piano trios ever since I first started buying gramophone records. I recall with particular pleasure the Supraphon records of piano trios, most notably by the Suk Trio of the Dvorak op 65 and the great Tchaikovsky trio. These performances I now have on CD now, of course. But Volkmann is an entirely new name.

Suitable musical game to go hunting for inevitably gets harder to find as you get older and more knowledgeable. Also, priority inevitably shifts from getting new stuff to listening properly to what you already have. So this is a nice reminder of how music was when I was first finding out about it in my teens.