Matters of taste, preference and prejudice loom large this week. “Oh no,” said a musician of my acquaintance. “Not another cycle of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas.”

This was in response to the imminent launch of an Edinburgh International Festival series, beginning a week today.

Granted, there’s an on-going cycle in Glasgow that’s not quite run its course; but while my chum’s eyebrows rose heavenwards in search of relief from yet more of Beethoven’s muse, he maybe didn’t catch the glint of intrigue in my eye.

I don’t particularly know the playing of Rudolf Buchbinder, soloist in the Edinburgh cycle. I guess I will in less than a month, as I’ll be reviewing seven of his nine concerts. Not, I imagine, that Buchbinder’s interpretations will make much difference to those resistant to the lure of Ludwig van.

The whole business, irrespective of whether any individual piece is a masterpiece, is ultimately down to personal taste and the response in your heart, head and nerve-endings.

Many years ago, I devised an extra-mural music course which ran in Glasgow University. Last I heard it was going still, under the wise and experienced captaincy of Hugh Macdonald, a former director of the BBC SSO.

I remember the shock of my reaction in that first year of the course to one member of the class who approached me at the end of an early session. I had been wittering on about something to do with Sibelius’s music, and playing examples via a CD.

One lady in the class said that not only did she dislike Sibelius’s music, but she found it distasteful and extremely unpleasant to experience: “All that intensity,” she said, screwing up her face as though she’d just smelled something sour. As horrified as I was, her words burned into my brain.

But why was I surprised, I wondered later in more thoughtful mode? If someone had done the same to me with the music of Bruckner, I’d either have been bored into oblivion or fallen asleep.

I just don’t get the stuff. Yonks ago, when Roger Norrington and his London Classical Players recorded Bruckner’s Third Symphony for EMI, with the music going at lightning-speed and as sleek as a gazelle (well, maybe not quite a gazelle), Norrington knocked about 10 minutes off the land-speed record for the thing. Maybe there’s an epiphany on the way, I wondered.

The thrill of the chase died off eventually, however, and I put my hands up in surrender, allowing the leviathans who laboriously sculpt Bruckner’s long-distance and interminable symphonic cathedrals to get on with it, slowly, brick by brick. Prejudice, I guess: a blind spot or a plain old shortcoming. Absolutely nothing to be proud of.

I remember one conductor with the BBC SSO (Gunther Bauer-Schenck, I think) saying to the band, of a piece they all hated: “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s just suck hard on this lemon and get it done.”

And I also remember a moment of excruciating embarrassment in the holy of holies, the Golden Room of Vienna’s Musikverein, where the late Walter Weller was due to conduct the RSNO in a performance of James MacMillan’s overture Britannia, a gloriously rude and knockabout example of fun-filled musical iconoclasm, in which Knees Up Mother Brown, petticoats akimbo, made a frothy cameo appearance.

Walter seriously did not get it. And nor did he relish the embarrassment of conducting it in front of his venerated, conservative, Viennese audience. He went so far as to ask MacMillan at least to let him remove the car hooters from the score: real honkers they were.

His request was declined, so Walter took the initiative and stood in front of his home audience, grey-suited to a man, explaining that this was the quaint idea of British humour. The audience, dutifully, turned to stone.

But the finest and funniest instance of personal taste, preference and prejudice, all rolled up in one ball and running quietly rampant, took place at a concert many years ago.

It might well have been in the Grand Circle of the Usher Hall, as one young couple there gradually lost interest in the wonderfully structured classical music being formally delivered by the pristine orchestra, and began to turn their interest and clear preference towards each other. By the third movement of whatever was being played (who was listening any longer?) the young couple had abandoned all pretence and were getting stuck into each other. I’m not sure the applause was for them, though they certainly merited a five-star review.