It's been a heavy concert going few days, four on the trot.  There was Nicola Benedetti looking great in a swanky black and gold number while elegantly and sinuously playing Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5.  Then a very retiring little chap in what looked like a Romanian hand me down suit thundering his way through the dramatic and romantic Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1.  He followed it up with a short contrasting encore that had more rests than notes in it.  On Sunday Donald Runnicles looking every inch the musical maestro with his long white hair (pity about the growing bald patch) steered his band through the peaks and troughs of Mahler's 9th Symphony.  How can so many violinists play at the same time and yet there be such quietness?

All very enjoyable but the best was undoubtedly the SNJO.  They played Tommy Smith's arrangement of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue which he had tweeked a bit, reducing the tenor sax's contribution in favour of featuring a wonderful Japanese pianist called Makoto Ozone.  I was sitting about three feet from the grand piano experiencing shock and awe at how his hands danced around.

There was even more shock and awe at Ozone's arrangement of Mozart's 9th Piano Concerto.  Some of what the band played was clearly kosher Mozart albeit with different colours (how he'd have loved a sax section), some was clearly pure invention.  But much of the piece was I assume a subtle blend.

In standard jazz band style there were solos from various players.  I particularly enjoyed a gentle and lyrical soprano sax solo.  There was an extraordinarily vigorous drum solo that seemed as though it could only end in the death of the drummer but which was gracefully brought to a conclusion by gentle encouragement from the piano.

It was altogether a brilliant evening.

Only one concert to look forward to this week unless I decide to squeeze in a piping evening but three plays in compensation.
 

Goodness knows how many productions of Midsummer Night's Dream I have seen. It must be well into double figures but until now I had not seen an all male version.

We know that in Shakespeare's day women's parts were played by men or by boys so Propellor's female free productions are I suppose akin to the original instrument movement in music. I wouldn't claim to be an ace at distinguishing a modern instrument from one of its ancestors but I can generally tell the difference between a man and a woman. Not always as my momentary assumption at a recent party that a closely cropped hairstyle atop a tall slim frame should be included in a greeting of hello chaps proved.

But I had no trouble in this show and that's one of its faults I think.  I'm sure that 16th and 17th century theatres strove to make their audiences believe in the femininity of the characters.  They weren't presenting drag acts or pantomime queens.  Here they seemed too obviously male.   

However this is unnecessary carping, and indeed a female with whom I talked about it had no such reservations.  The show was very enjoyable.  Staging and costumes were excellent.  The disposition of actors in every scene and the finely choreographed group movement of the fairies made me weep at the inadequacies of our productions.  The rude mechanicals did the business though they couldn't compete with those I saw at The Globe last summer.

I thought I was going to another all male show tonight at Mathew Bourne's version of Swan Lake so I blinked when the second person on stage was clearly a woman.  But I had got hold of the wrong end of the chromosome. It's the swans that are all male in contrast to the traditional band of birds.  Other cast members are appropriately sexed for their roles.

What can you say about this version of the ballet except that it's wonderful and you just can't believe that anyone else will ever come along to re-imagine it so excitingly.

I saw this on a tee shirt while I was on holiday.  I imagine it was designed to make the mathematically literate feel good about themselves while posing a puzzle to the rest of humanity.

Thankfully I was able to dredge from my memory the name for the square root of minus one otherwise I should have remained outside the self satisfied coterie.  Imagine the disgrace.

There were a couple of interesting concerts last week.  The SCO featured Macmillan's percussion concerto Veni, Veni Emmanuel.  This is a fascinating piece to watch.  There are drums, bongos, tam-tams, xylophones, vibraphones, cowbells, wood blocks and sundry other instruments spread across the stage in front of the orchestra and although the soloist doesn't have to run he certainly has to walk briskly from one side to the other past the conductor every so often to get to the appropriate instrument.

You can find various performances on Youtube but this BBC Proms one of the premiere in 1992 gives lovely shots from various points within the orchestra and a little bit of introductory information.

In the final moments of the piece every player becomes a percussionist.  Each has a little steel bar either attached to their music stand or in their hand and they play on these with I suppose another little steel bar to make a light, tinkling, shimmering field of sound.  The soloist then joins in on a set of tubular bells.  When all dies away to nothing you are left with only the reverberations of the bells in the air.  It's a spellbinding moment that fortunately was not spoilt by premature clapping.

The clapping came in one movement too soon at the RSNO performance of Ravi Shankar's Raga Mala (Sitar Concerto No2).  It did sound awfully like it might be the end and I don't suppose anyone in the hall had heard the piece before so forgiveable.

Shankar's daughter Anoushka was the sitar soloist sitting cross-legged on a little platform beside the conductor.  It was full of interesting sounds and I enjoyed it but the best bit of the evening for me was when the concerto was over.  Anoushka came on again and played an encore.  Those few minutes of unaccompanied sitar were delicious.

I'd never heard of Casablanca: The Gin Joint Cut but it sounded fun from the Evening News puff and so it proved last night.  Three very able actors take on all the main roles in a distilled version of the movie Casablanca.  They play it with tongues firmly in cheeks and milk the melodramatic possibilities.  The production whizzes along with loads of clever business and lots of gags.

It was here for one night only but you can catch it by treating yourself to April in Paris.   

For a very long time my bellwether of cinematic incomprehensibility has been Last Year at Marienbad.  Its position has been threatened from time to time, by Mullholland Drive for example, but it may now have been overtaken for ever by Under the Skin.

There's a certain hypnotic fascination to it but dearie me what a lot of nonsense.  If it was trying to tell me something it failed.

Verdi's Macbeth didn't grab me either although it was perfectly comprehensible.  I found it dull and lacking in tension.  I don't think that can be entirely because of familiarity with the story.  Maybe it's because of the scaled down musical forces as mentioned in the Guardian review or maybe the second back row in The King's was too far away from the action or maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

Whatever the reason I was disappointed.

I should have incorporated this in my postcard.  It was on my table at dinner on the 29th.  Thoughtful, no?

One can't be sure where they got "presented" from but possibilities present themselves.  In certain contexts "put forward" is a synonym of "present", as in "she presented her idea to the committee".  Clocks are also often presented on retiring but generally on retiring for good rather than for the night.  Or were they thinking of changing the clock to the present time?  It's a puzzle.

The phone by my bedside erupted into noisy life at 3 this morning and eventually drove me into going through to the lounge and disconnecting the line.

It may have been the BT engineers working hard through the night to fix the phone or more likely a repeat of the manic ringing that had followed my reporting of a fault earlier in the evening.  In either case it was to say the least a pain in the neck when I was still feeling ready for a good rest after a week's ski-ing.

Obertauern was lovely although extremely short of anything to do if you don't ski or if the weather is bad but fortunately the weather was great and the hotel had a smart little pool to relax in after coming off the slopes.

Some scenes from the Beatles film Help were filmed here and they've got a shop window of memorabilia that you can see in my homemade postcard.  The autobahn isn't a real one of course but a nice long wide comfortable slide down the hill.  Very much appreciated at the end of the day.