Richard The Third is over at last and here's a pretty picture of the cast to celebrate the fact.

I enjoyed my first Sunday night off for months by going to a splendid concert given by the Edinburgh University Chamber Orchestra.  This group is made up not of music students but of students who happen to play an instrument and I thought their playing was magnificent.

They had the benefit of professional musicians as conductors and soloists but the 40 odd players rose to the challenge of working with them without putting a foot wrong as far as I could tell.  The Reid Hall was the perfect venue and was filled with wonderful sound from the opening bars of Beethoven's First Piano Concerto to the closing notes of his Seventh Symphony. There were some particularly lovely moments from the wind section and the girl who played first flute was deservedly singled out by the conductor at the end.

Earlier in the day I'd been to another concert given by wind soloists from the SCO.  As an aspiring woodwind player I feel I should have enjoyed that more than I did but, pleasant as it was, the six players, quite naturally, couldn't summon up the enveloping mass of sound that the orchestra did.

I'll be trying to summon up a bit of sound myself shortly in the Dunedin Wind Band's St Andrew's Day concert.  Do come.