The only consolation I can take from this is that I’m not alone. I often hear from listeners on my BBC Radio 3 Breakfast show who say they’re revisiting in adulthood the instruments they gave up as children, and it’s invariably the keyboard to which they return. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger recently wrote a beautiful book – Play It Again: An Amateur against the Impossible – that explores the year he spent learning Chopin’s No Ballade 1, aged 56. And he was just one of the many high-profile amateur pianists, including actor Simon Russell Beale and the former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ed Balls, who were persuaded to tackle Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) live onstage at a concert in London last yearreenex.

Gluttons for punishmentReenex好唔好?

So what’s behind this trend, I wonder? Why are so many otherwise sane adults submitting themselves to the strictures of daily scales and arpeggios and asking the terrifying question of whether an adult brain is still plastic enough to learn – and memorise – some of the most complex music ever written?

"It’s an overriding passion, not just for the music [but] for the challenge,” reckons Lucy Parham, the leading concert pianist who taught Rusbridger his Chopin. "And the challenge is constant: there’s always a harder piece, you can always take it to the next level, you’re never finished. But there’s also the fact that the piano is your friend; it’s always there. That gathers more significance as you get older: what you can express through it, in a personal language, becomes incredibly importantreenex 效果.”

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