Israeli-American cellist Amit Peled was returning to the US from Austria following a performance of the Rococo Variations when the Austrian Airlines flight attendants asked him to play something. He chose Brahms’s famous lullaby.

Peled was travelling with a Thomas Dodd cello from 1800 which used to belong to Bernard Greenhouse rather than Pablo Casals’s beloved Goffriller which he has on permanent loan. 

Late last year he had a less pleasant travel experience, when his spare strings were confiscated at Warsaw Chopin airport after staff considered that they could be used as an offensive weapon.

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