The SCO dress code is all black with jackets optional, and ties whose absence looks as though it might be obligatory.  The classical player's need to show that he and his music are not as stuffy as they are thought to be, is it?

The music at the Britten centenary concert that I hadn't planned on going to was anything but stuffy.  The Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings by Britten himself was simply divine. It was preceded by two pieces that I suppose might be described as challenging, i.e. modern.

In introducing Harrison Birtwhistle's Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum the conductor pointed out that it was written when Monty Python was all the rage and that it probably needed to be listened to with a sense of humour.  You could believe having heard it that if you wanted to translate the Python anarchic style into sound you'd very likely end up with something like this.

Martin Suckling's Storm, Rose, Tiger saw the light of day as recently as 2011 and the 32 year old composer was there to enjoy it with us.  He was also giving a talk before the concert which had it not been for a craving for food I'd have gone to.  I should have had a bigger lunch.

Unusually for me I bought a programme - I thought I should at least know what words the tenor was singing.  Apart from that benefit I was able to read plenty about all the music.  Thanks to my saxophone studies I understand the words in those descriptions better than I used to but in the end it all boils down to whether the music you hear pleases you.  Storm, Rose, Tiger pleased me so it doesn't much matter that Suckling talks about "intervals that fall in the gaps - a semi-tone and a half for example, or the interval between a major third and a minor third - that give the harmony a special and often (to my[i.e. his] mind ) radiant quality".

Unusually for me also I sat upstairs.  It must be years since I was upstairs in the Queen's Hall and I was pleased to see that the pews have had their hard bench seating replaced by fold down seats something like the strapontins in the Paris metro, only more comfy, since I plan to sit upstairs next season. 

The second half was given over to Mozart's Symphony No. 40. It was lovely but I preferred the modern stuff.

Coming back to what the musicians wear I'm conscious that I haven't mentioned the women.  The SNJO doesn't have any and in the RSNO and the SCO the women wear a variety of little black numbers.  Let's leave it like that.  Enough attention is paid to women's wear.  Let's see the boys glamming up for a change.

The jazzmen's suits were Hawaian extravaganza compared to the white tie and tails worn by the RSNO's saxophonist the following evening.  I suppose the appearance of a saxophonist in a symphony orchestra is rare enough that not to have had him wear the 200 year old uniform would have seemed doubly indecorous.

Not that wearing the tie and tails outfit is uniformly applauded.  This item from Toronto (from whence the RSNO's current music director came) muses on how long it may last and includes a little video showing that I'm not the first person to have thought of enlisting the talents of students to rethink musical uniforms.

The saxophonist was there to play in Copland's Piano Concerto which uses stylistic elements associated with jazz. While it's unusual to see a sax at a symphony concert it is probably even more unusual to have two piano concertos on the bill.  In the first half of the programme Xiayin Wang played Barber's Piano Concerto.  I enjoyed both pieces but the Barber wins hands down in terms of  bravura and excitement.

That excitement means the orchestra and the pianist have to go like the clappers a lot of the time and it's not surprising, aesthetic reasons apart, that Xiayin should have changed her iridescent gold dress at the interval for a similarly iridescent blue one to tackle the Copland in.  Harder to tell if the string players changed one white shirt for another but given the sweat they must have worked up in those tailcoats I shouldn't be at all surprised.

The McEwan Hall is used to fancy dress in the form of academic gowns and mortarboards but today the students of the Edinburgh College of Art (but lately fully incorporated into the university) were holding their fashion show there.

For an absolutely delightful hour and a half we were treated to a parade of imaginative, colourful and beautiful work.  Especially interesting I thought were the performance costumes.  It all sped past so fast that I'm treating myself to a DVD of the event if I can get the website to accept my money.

Here's just a few tasters from the snaps I managed to take.

   

The members of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra could benefit from a word with some of those students. They produced a great concert of big band music this evening but in their grey suits, white shirts and conservative ties they looked a little dull. Something to do with the jazz musician's need to have his music taken seriously is it?

In this neck of the woods when you want to know what an experienced critic thought of a show you've seen you turn to Joyce McMillan, unless it is an amateur show, because Joyce does not (as she told me once) have enough time to include them.

Fortunately we have another critic who does find the time, and wondering whether my thoughts about A Boston Marriage were a little ungenerous I turned to see what Thom Dibdin had made of it.  I found my opinion expressed rather more cogently than several hours labour on my part would have produced. 

I had a little excursion out to the Falkirk Wheel recently and would recommend it.  I'd even recommend getting into the wrong lane on the M9 and seeing a bit more of the countryside than is strictly necessary.

One of the bonuses of going there is that you can take in the Antonine Wall as well although I don't think we came across it.  But then you probably need the eyes of an archeologist to be sure since what's left is mostly just bumpy ground.

I happened to pick up a magazine in Italy last month that featured articles about the edges of the Roman Empire and it includes this picture that I thought at first was the Antonine but is in fact Hadrian's wall which is in a much better state although the picture still has something of a photoshop air to it.

They do admit that this picture of a Roman lavvy is an imagining but declare it to be based on structures that are still well preserved.  Elsewhere perhaps.  I have seen them in Ostia but not in West Lothian where the Wheel's facilities were bang up to date.

200 years before the wall was built Julius Caesar was strutting his stuff in ancient Rome, inspiring Shakespeare's play which in turn inspired some of the criminals taking part in a production of it to lead better lives on their release.

So said the docudrama Cesare Deve Morire which follows the inmates of a high security prison as they put the play together.  You can see that it's all about parallels in the lives of the prisoners and the characters but despite some interesting moments I found it disappointing.  The reason is I think that I expected more docu than drama.  There is for example a scene in which a scene between Caesar and Metellus(?) is being rehearsed.  The dialogue between the characters turns into a personal argument between the prisoners based on the similarity of the dynamics between Shakespeare's pair and the dynamics between the  two prisoners.  It came over to me as wholly staged.  Now that's not necessarily a bad thing but it meant I had little faith in much of the documentary truth being shown.

On the other hand the joy of the cast after they took their call at the end of the show seemed 100% heartfelt as did the words (scripted or not) of the prisoner being locked up afterwards - "since I discovered art this cell has become a prison".

Being locked up or rather, in the expression that has come from Boston this week, in lock down, was one of the alternatives offered to the participants in Deadinburgh.  This great fun show doesn't need my description.  Read Claire's.

There were lots of questions to be answered in Deadinburgh and asking questions to get at the truth is at the heart of Rob Drummond's Quiz Show.  I caught the penultimate performance and am glad I did.

When the play opens we are the studio audience in a TV quiz show.  The floor manager puts us through our applauding paces and then the contestants enter and the quizmaster bounces on.  The questioning starts and it's all a very light-hearted and funny parody of just such a quiz.  But as the play goes on it gets darker and darker until all the truth comes out, the play ends and the audience sit in silence.

No floor manager could have made us applaud at that moment but when the lights came up and the cast came on stage to take a bow the applause was deservedly generous.

The run is over but there's bound to be a revival.  Until then avoid reviews and hope that those who saw it will keep shtum.

That's a lot of percussion lined up in front of me at the Queen's Hall but it turned out that not all of it was active at the same time and much of the banging was quite restrained.  Indeed the tubular bells were struck ever so gently and infrequently in an ethereal sounding piece by Arvo Pärt.  On the other hand there was some really loud, lusty and athletic double bass work in Britten's Prelude and Fugue for Strings.

The SCO are celebrating Britten's centenary with three concerts and this one, apart from Pärt's Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, was a mixture of Britten and Purcell and it's one of the most enjoyable that I've been to in their entire season.  So much so that I'm going to go to one of the other three which I had not intended to do.

The hall was packed (the empty seats in the photo were for the chorus) in contrast to the Brunton Theatre where a small and doubtless select band watched four Victorian one-act farces the previous evening.  The staging had a raggedy church youth group air to it and although the three actors pumped hard at the chests of these old gems I think they need to accept that if not already dead then they are terminally feeble and will soon expire.

If I were a twit I'd have been tweeting to the world with joy this morning as I made my way homewards from Summerhall in deliciously almost warm Spring sunshine.  Has winter gone at last?

I'd been to Summerhall to hear Owen Dudley Edwards expatiate on Conan Doyle; not as the writer of Sherlock Holmes although that creation popped up frequently, but as a historical novelist.  Dudley Edwards spoke at a rate of knots for an hour without referring to a single note and in the couple of extracts he read performed with gusto, endowing the various characters with appropriate voices.  He has clearly been a loss to the stage.

This talk was part of the latest addition to Edinburgh's bouquet of festivals - the Historical Fiction Festival.  Yesterday I enjoyed some enlightening words on Walter Scott in a celebration of the completion of the Edinburgh edition of his novels.  All 29 volumes available at the special discounted festival price of £1300.  Perhaps they will be remaindered before I run the chance of bumping into Sir Walter and I will be able to profit from the scholarship that makes them preferable to the cheapo editions that have passed through my hands over the years.  I was a bit surprised to realise in the course of the talk that I have read quite a bit of Scott; not recently it's true but one of the speakers maintained that his omission from the current school curriculum is no bad thing since in her opinion it's better to encounter his work as an adult, so maybe it's time for a second exposure.

I was also surprised later in the day how scenes from The Leopard came back to me as they were mentioned in the discussion between Alan Massie and Joe Farrell of Lampedusa's superb tale of the transition from aristocratic hegemony to bourgeois thralldom in 19th century Sicily.  Thanks to the generosity of Valvona and Croalla the hour between the end of the discussion and the screening of Visconti's film of the novel was enlivened by a glass or three of Nero d'Avola.

In the course of this quaffing I was approached by two chaps one of whom said that surely I was Ken somebody or other.  I didn't catch the surname but surmised from his slightly shy manner that this Ken was a public person, whether a historical novelist or an academic commentator I know not.  My reply was simply no and that it is very easy to mistake one bearded bald headed old man for another.  But the three of us had a jolly chat for quarter of an hour so thanks to Ken X for that.

Unlike most book festivals this is not primarily a shop window for authors exposing their new works for sale.  Admittedly in the cases of Scott, Lampedusa and Conan Doyle that would be tricky but so uncommercial is it that the Summerhall bookshop has only a few books by some of the living authors who feature and now that I have bought their one copy of Conan Doyle's The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard they have nothing at all by the dead ones.

There will soon be lots of books in Summerhall since the SCDA have found space there for their script library, having had to move from the council premises they currently occupy.  I don't want to claim all the credit but when they appealed for a new home in November last year I suggested they try there. 

Twits will no doubt have been exchanging 140 character bursts of applause over the Grads' production of Jerusalem which earned itself a five star review this week.  Last night is tonight so you still have time to see it - Adam House at 19.30.  It's a great show.

I suppose you can characterise anything that has men and women dancing in close proximity one to the other as being about love so Labyrinth of Love is a pretty good title for the piece that Ballet Rambert open their current tour with.  It was lovely to look at, had some gorgeous leaping around, staggeringly athletic lifts and a very impressive giant whose bottom half had to gyrate, run and swoop in the blindness of an enfolding skirt.  There's a glimpse of that in this video.  I loved the music, the singer and the background projections so that was a very satisfactory start to the evening for me.

The second piece which also had live music was less exciting.  It was beautifully done, pretty to look at etc but unmemorable.

Now for both of these pieces there was a deaf interpreter on-stage.  Since there was a singer in Labyrinth of Love you can see the point of that to pass on the words but it doesn't seem to me to add anything to make violin movements or whatever in a piece without words.  Indeed if you subscribe to the idea that dance is music made flesh it doesn't show much faith in the choreographer.

For the third and fourth items both the band and the interpreter headed for the hills and we were left in the one case with some mercifully brief shouting of recorded nonsense words and in the other some electronic tooting and scraping.

Now I don't object to electronic music.  Indeed I commissioned some for a theatre production I did but this was electronic music best appreciated by the deaf.

The Winter's Tale is not a play that I knew anything about so the RSC production visiting Edinburgh this week was welcome on that count alone.  The theatre was full on opening night as well it might have been for the production was splendid.

The story is pretty daft.  Leontes, King of Sicilia, is convinced on the flimsiest of evidence that his wife is pregnant by his best chum Polixenes, King of Bohemia.  P, who is visiting L, escapes with the help of L's right-hand man Camillo who doesn't want to carry out the orders he has to murder him.  The Queen, Hermione, is delivered of a girl child.  L is restrained from dispatching her to Hades and instead has her sent off to be abandoned on a distant shore.  Luckily for the plot that turns out to be Bohemia where she is found by a passing shepherd.

Hermione is pronounced dead and L's son comes down with a heavy dose of something that finishes him off too.  L then learns from the Delphic Oracle that he had the wrong end of the stick all the time.  His late Queen was innocent.  Weeping he is hoist aloft by a wonderful piece of stage machinery where he spends the rest of the first half and most of the second.

Years pass and Perdita (the abandoned Princess) grows up and attracts the attention of Prince Florizel (son of P).  Of course F and P are ignorant of her royal blood.  F doesn't care but P is livid that his son should be dallying with a shepherd's daughter.  I couldn't be sure from her accent on which side of the Pennines the sheep were grazing but it was one or t'other.  There is a lot of singing and dancing and Shakespearean horsing around before the young lovers flee pursued by P.

They get to Sicilia as do their pursuers et al, where thanks to the shepherd's revelations of how he found the girl and the trinkets left with her L realises she is his daughter.  There is a lot of rejoicing and relief on P's part that she's fit to marry his son after all (just need to tidy up that accent).

Even more rejoicing ensues when that nifty stage machinery is found to conceal a statue of Hermione that comes to life.  Everyone is very happy and no-one spoils the party by mentioning L's dead son.

The happy youngsters lead off a final dance that eventually involves the entire cast.  If you have ever tried to get co-ordinated movement from two or more actors you will know just how marvellous a piece of work this is.

Great show.