Unfortunately, the car in front braked suddenly and I ran straight into the back of it.” She arrived late, and met Julian as he was leaving the stage door. “There was a track I thought was really lovely and I looked down at the CD cover to see what it was. He had given her his new CD, Unexpected Songs, which she had been listening to in the car on the way. Again, Jiaxin met him after his rehearsal, and he invited her to the concert. It had been, he says, “a very difficult time for me” (his third marriage was breaking up). The next time they met, in 2006, on Julian’s last tour of New Zealand, was “when something really started to click,” he says. “Being a cellist herself, she was very helpful, and I was able to get a good recording.” “At rehearsal, the sound wasn’t good and I asked Jiaxin if she could come and listen,” says Julian. By then, Jiaxin had graduated and was playing in the Auckland Philharmonia and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Julian got her email address, and contacted her two years later when he was on tour in the country again to ask if she was still in New Zealand, adding that he might need her technical help with a concert that was going to be broadcast. “Our teacher took us backstage to say hello,” she says. Born in China, Jiaxin had graduated from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and was doing a master’s degree at Auckland University. The first time, in 2000, Julian, the celebrated cellist, was on tour in New Zealand, and Jiaxin was one of a number of music students invited to hear him rehearse. It wasn’t until the third time Julian Lloyd Webber and Jiaxin Cheng met that the idea of a romantic relationship seemed a possibility.
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