Playing the piano, I get so nervous that my teacher has to leave the room or hide behind a curtain

April may well be the cruellest month. It is also the month for chest infections, which are cruel in their own way. This week, Mr Millard and I went to hear the wonderful musician Mitsuko Uchida playing Mozart piano sonatas in the Great Performers series at the Barbican. And what started off as an awkward moment soon became excruciating.

Mr Millard had a cough. It was one of those loud, involuntary and repetitive ones. He came armed with water, tissues and lozenges, but the situation was tough. We were in the middle of a very long row of seats. The concert was being recorded by Radio 3. People were starting to turn round. By the end of the first half, as Uchida prepared to begin the B-minor Adagio, he gave up the fight and lunged for the foyer, where there was a Coughers' Monitor set up specifically for the excluded. By the end of the night, there must have been a right party out there, as there were a fair few other sufferers: a sneezer to our left, a hawker in the front, and a shrieker above us in the circle.

The trouble is that if you even quietly clear your throat at a piano recital, it will reverberate. There is no other manifestation of audience awe quite like the completely silent atmosphere surrounding a solo piano performance.

I have moaned in this column about the lack of discipline with theatregoers who will not stop chatting in the stalls, but piano playing seems to elicit the opposite response.

It must be the whole awe-inspiring arrangement - the solo instrument illuminated in the style of Mastermind; the performer's mental recall and digital dexterity; the sheer pain flitting across his or her face as he or she attempts to connect with the composer on a spiritual level.

Yet even though the audience appears utterly reverent, I can't help wondering what is going through the listeners' minds. As far as I'm concerned, the trouble about a classical concert is that it is so tough to focus on. Five minutes after we begin (or ten, if I'm lucky), I start musing about what I should be doing tomorrow, or whether we'll have time to eat after the show, and if so where, and so on. From then on, the entire concert is spent hauling my attention from domestic incidentals such as the design of Easter bonnets and back to the case in hand. This never happens to me at the theatre.

The only time I feel an instinctive connection with live classical music is when I'm listening to something I myself have attempted to play, because I can hear how it should sound when played properly. And playing the piano, even at a ridiculously low level like mine, gives you not only a fundamental connection with the structure and shape of what you are hearing, but also a tiny hint of what it must be like up there on stage.

When my teacher, John Reid (himself a talented concert performer), comes round and I stagger through my pieces, I get so nervous that he has to leave the room or hide behind a curtain. I just cannot bear it. My hands shake. The connection between finger and brain is severed. The piece collapses.

And that is just on a Tuesday morning to an audience of one. Imagine the sheer mental control you need to play before the unseen millions listening to Radio 3, plus a couple of thousand at the Barbican, six of whom just cannot stop coughing.

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