When I opened my diary this morning I read "11 a.m. Usher Hall".  Ah, I thought.  That'll be the  Sax Ecosse concert in the Emerging Artists series.  I've been looking forward to that.

So I got to the hall in good time, bought my ticket (only three quid), got myself a coffee (an extortionate two quid) and sat down to peruse the Traverse and Filmhouse brochures that I'd picked up on the way.

After a bit I glanced at my ticket.  It said "Jemma Brown".

I was nonplussed.  Who is she and what does she do?

From the free programme that I was handed as I went in I learnt that she was a mezzo soprano and that I was about to experience a recital of Russian, German and American songs.

For these morning concerts unless you are in a wheelchair you sit in the organ gallery so that the performers are not looking out onto a vast and thinly populated auditorium.  It would seem almost impossible in such a big venue but that orientation creates quite an intimate atmosphere and even a small crowd (which it usually is) gives body to the event.

I took my preferred position centre stage in the front row, read the blurb. contemplated the grand piano and waited for the emerging artists to emerge; they duly did and the show started with half a dozen Spanish songs set to music by Shostakovich and sung in Russian.

There was a teacher in Perugia who liked to declaim to we foreigners stumbling roughly through some simple utterance - "L'Italiano non è una lingua, è una musica."  I think Russian is the same, albeit in a darker and more melancholy register.  The songs and the singing of them, and don't let's forget the piano accompaniment, were lovely.

Then we had a Schumann setting of  My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose, some Brahms and a group of songs by Korngold.  The texts of those were by various people on the subject of parting and apparently when he wrote the music Korngold was being kept away from the girl he eventually married because of the disapproval of the proposed match by both families.  So they were not cheerful ditties unlike the three American songs celebrating flowers and the Spring that closed the programme.

I would not have chosen to go to this concert, and indeed I didn't, but I'm very glad I was there.  I enjoyed it thoroughly.

And Sax Ecosse?  They played last Tuesday.  A simple diary malfunction.