The RSNO started off their new season with a big powerful work, Mahler's 2nd Symphony, known as the Resurrection.  When in the finale orchestra, chorus and soloists are all giving it laldy it raises the rafters and the spirits.

There are no rafters in the Usher Hall but there do seem to be new seats in the stalls.  They are pretty much carbon copies of the previous seats with one user friendly difference.  You used to see punters trying to find their seats bending down and peering at the underside seat numbers though even from that attitude they were almost unreadable.  The cognoscenti meanwhile would stroll along the row and place their ticket in front of the little golden plate and by some miracle of physics the number could be read effortlessly from a standing position.  Now bold black digits can be picked out instantly by anyone.

I'm not a great fan of the organ but amongst the works that I do like is Poulenc's Organ Concerto which I first heard at Snape Maltings while I was working in Norwich over twenty-five years ago.  I've seldom heard it live since so when I saw it was being played at Greyfriars I went along and enjoyed it very much.  I also enjoyed another piece that I've added to the small group of organ works that thrill me.  This was a very powerful and intense concerto by Kenneth Leighton. 

The beautiful organ of Greyfriars church

There's a Spanish film festival on in Edinburgh at the moment.  There are about a dozen films of which I have now seen two and will unfortunately see only one more. 

Everyone has heard of Federico Lorca, Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel and a number of other men known collectively as the generation of '27 but that generation also contained a number of female intellectuals whose names are hardly known to the Spanish never mind the rest of us.  Las Sinsombrero is a documentary designed to open our eyes to eight of those women writers and artists.  It was an extremely interesting and enlightening film and is part of a larger project to bring those women and others back into the place they properly should occupy in Spanish cultural history.

Magical Girl could hardly be a greater contrast.  This feature film is the story of how the father of a young girl who is dying of leukemia sets out to satisfy his daughter's fascination with a Japanese manga character by buying her a dress and wand like the one illustrated below.

You sit back and relax thinking this will be a warm-hearted, moving little film that will bring a lump to your throat and may even require recourse to a tissue or two.  No such thing.  It turns out to be a much darker movie altogether involving blackmail, sadism and other nasty stuff.  I thought it was a great film but don't want to give too much away so keep a look out for it.