I heard recently that when Christmas trees were first introduced into Britain they were crowned with flags of the Empire rather than with angels.  Not having any Empire flags handy I've had to improvise.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE

 

Although I was at the Cameo to see Falstaff at the weekend it had been a while since I'd been there to see a film.  The end of my Tuesday class for the term opened up the possibility of enjoying their silver screen session this week when for £2.80 I could see a film with coffee and biscuits thrown in.

I daresay that was what drew me to Saving Mr Banks since although I knew it had something to do with Mary Poppins I've never read any of the books nor seen the film and only recognize vaguely a couple of the better known songs.  I had no idea who Mr Banks was or why anyone would wish to save him, let alone make a film about it.

But what a lucky choice.  It's a super film. The story of the tussle between Walt Disney and the author of Mary Poppins, P L Travers, over making a film from her book is a fascinating one to start with.  Then Saving Mr Banks is beautifully shot in period, two periods actually since scenes from Travers' childhood in pre first war Australia are intercut with the progress of the 1961 Los Angeles script discussions.  Then it's superbly acted with Tom Hanks as avuncular Disney, Emma Thompson as frosty buttoned up Travers, Colin Farrell as Travers' wastrel father and an excellent supporting cast. Then it's moving, heart-warming, redemptive - you name it.  A great movie.

My only slight reservation has nothing to do with the film but with the Cameo's restored screen 2.  It used to be a long thin room with a not very big screen at one end.  It's still a long thin room but the seating has been swung round through 90 degrees and a substantial screen installed.  The result is that even in the backmost row the picture loomed pretty large and pretty bright.  My eyes were not very comfortable. 

But then I am used to what is thought of nowadays as pretty much a miniature TV screen.

Edinburgh's Christmas and New Year celebrations have changed this year.  The town looks lovely but some old favourites like the torchlight procession have gone and pretty well all that made it an individual and interesting place to visit in the way of street theatre and participative games has been replaced by commercial entertainment and augmented opportunities to eat, drink and spend money on more of the same tired old cheap jewellery, funny hats, wooden grotesques and healing Christmas candles.

A haiku  lamenting their failure of imagination should be carved into the skulls of those responsible.

There was no failure of imagination in how the conductor used his whole body to sweep the whole orchestra along in Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra.  He waved his arms, bounced his head back and forth, threw his body from side to side and actually leapt in the air with arms stretched above his head as he brought the work to a conclusion.  He wasn't a young man either. 

I'd never heard this music before but I loved it and can see Lutoslawski rivaling Shostakovitch in my desert island selection.  One of the gems glittering in the silver lining that lies under my not having been recycled into August: Osage County is that I won't have to forgo the Shostakovitch concert I've a ticket for in May.

There was another musical treat for me last night when I saw the transmission of Verdi's Falstaff from the Metropolitan Opera.  This larger than life character was played by the very large Ambrogio Maestri who was wonderful.  The show is a riot of comedy and in this production the scene that culminates in Falstaff being toppled into the Thames from a laundry basket was simply stupendously staged and performed.

Maestri is obviously a keen eater but he's also a keen cook and his risotto was wheeled on during the interval entertainment.  Even more entertainingly he misunderstood the interviewer's request to try some and picked up a spoon ready to dig in himself.

I enjoyed a performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor last night with the added benefit afterwards, thanks to a group of fellow concertgoers on the 49 bus, of hearing about the imperfections that my cloth ears hadn't picked up.

One of their number was vigorously in favour of original instrument performance of such baroque masterpieces and if you are of the same mind you can catch one here.  Youtube tells you it's from the 2012 Proms but fails to credit the band.  The BBC archives reveal all. 

The Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra gave big band favourites a lusty outing at Summerhall at the weekend.  You might think that music is not old enough for more modern instruments to have crept in but they did have a keyboard instead of an acoustic piano. The bus man would surely have forgiven that.

Tommy's senior band, the SNJO, in their search for authenticity in their tribute to Duke Ellington go so far as to reproduce the microphone placings of the era as well as using an acoustic piano. It wasn't the one man, one mic democracy of today.

Grappling with self-assembly furniture has left me with this nice little pile to dispose off.  The half dozen bin bags full of polystyrene padding and other wrappings have already found their way to landfill.  This lot will need a special journey to the dump.  There is no way it will fit into our recycling bins.

I'm hoping to be recycled myself after this evening.  No sooner is one production over than the next gets on the road and tonight I'm auditioning for May's show.  It's an American play that won the Pulitzer prize in 2008 and was very well received when it crossed the Atlantic.

A film version of August: Osage County starring Meryl Streep opens in the States on Christmas Day and should arrive in the UK some time in January.  I've watched the trailer and it looks fun, although naturally our stage version will be even more fun, at least for the people taking part.