Lo and behold I came across Mike Mainieri's music again within days of hearing him play when looking for a new tune to work on from my current ABRSM jazz book.  A sign from on high?  Probably not but I'm now getting to grips with his Sara's Touch.

What with a saxophone weekend in the Lakes and a trip to the Hebrides I'm not going to see much of this year's film festival.  I did get to the so called opening gala, though the crowd of smartly bekilted and fashionably befrocked teeming down the steps of the Festival Theatre as a more modestly dressed crowd queued to get in rather suggested that I was going to a post gala screening.

Anyway Tommy's Honour is a very good film, well worth your seeing when it comes out on release.  The Tommy in question is the son of Old Tom Morris, both of them figures of renown in the development of golf in the 19th century and respectively youngest and oldest ever winners of the Open Championship.

The film tells a great story.  There is of course sporting triumph and defeat.  There is generational tension.  There is a love story. There is the class struggle between the gentry of the golf world and men like the Morrises.  And there is tragedy.  All of it filmed in Fife and East Lothian in six weeks during which, according to the director there was only one day of rain.

Another super family story was the highly fictional (I imagine) and highly entertaining Belle Famille. A businessman returns to France en route for a meeting in London after fifteen years in China.  He has a Chinese lady in tow to present to his mother and discovers there is a tussle over the former family home in the provinces.  The fiancee is also a colleague so he packs her off to London to keep the meeting warm for him while he investigates the old home situation.

His childhood chum is involved as is the local mayor and his late father's mistress.  He has a run in with the mistress's daughter (not sired by his own dad fortunately, otherwise social norms and possibly laws would clearly be in danger of being broken before the last reel has run).  Helped by a gloriously funny character who had a crush on him at school he finds out what dark deeds have been done in the past.

There's a scene at a concert worthy of a Brian Rix farce in which evryone runs in and out in pursuit of some aspect of the plot.  Our hero is always on the point of going to London but a turn of the plot always prevents him.  At one point he is run off the road by his childhood chum who has been in a relationship with the mistress's daughter but gets dumped and suspects it's all our hero's fault. Which of course it is. After numerous twists and turns it all ends happily for everyone as you would expect.

Jean-Paul Rappeneau, the screenwriter and director, known to us for his magnificent Cyrano starring Gerard Depardieu, was there for a Q&A but I didn't hang around for much of that.

Before that I saw an interesting documentary about Chile.  Chicago Boys described the influence of the moneterist school of economics centred on the University of Chicago on those Chileans who studied there.  In particular it focused on the period leading up to the overthrow of the Allende government and the subsequent dictatorship. Undoubted economic progress was made thanks to the plans and model developed by the Chicago Boys during the Pinochet period but at some cost.  One of them who served as Finance Minister made the barely believable statement that he was unaware of the human rights violations that occurred at the time.     

There was a more light-hearted air to the set of animations competing for the McLaren Award for new British animation that I saw earlier, though a couple of them had a darkish tinge.  I was particularly pleased to see Isabella the film I'd made an abortive attempt to see at the Glasgow Short Film Festival a few months ago.  Mind you I didn't give it my number 1 vote.  That went to a delightfully funny and thoroughly traditional animation about a cat's visit to the vet.  Unfortunately the competitors were split over two screenings and I couldn't get to the second so I only saw half the field.

The SNJO concert at the Queen's Hall on Friday was rather sparsely attended which was a great shame.  Tommy Smith had once again brought a guest player of world class to play with his talented band.  Maybe Mike Mainieri is not a household name to Edinburgh jazz fans (I for one had never heard of him though judging by the list of those he's played with I've probably got a few CDs on which he features) or maybe they don't like his instrument, the vibraphone.  Whatever the reason they missed a really good gig.  I hope the citizens of Glasgow and Aberdeen turned out in greater numbers.

Liz Lochhead has created very popular and successful Scots versions of a number of Moliere's plays and now she's written a play about the man himself.  She's made a very good job of it.  While it's very funny as befits its subject there are moments of sadness and loss that add a poignant seasoning.

I'm a Moliere fan so was predisposed to enjoy the show, which is the last in the Lyceum's season, but even I found the early scenes a wee bit lacking in fizz.  Fortunately things warm up and Thon Man Moliere soon starts firing on all four cylinders.  Jimmy Chisolm is superb as Moliere, especially in his rant about the King's suppression of Tartuffe and is ably supported by a cast that know their business and a technical team that know theirs.

The birdlife around here is predominantly made up of pigeons, seagulls and magpies so it was delightful to find two beautiful goldfinches perched on my balcony.  They didn't hang around long enough for me to get a picture so I've pinched one from a twitcher site and photoshopped it onto my balcony. 

Here it is, as large as life.  Well larger actually.

The RSNO did a Cole Porter concert a couple of weeks ago.  They pinned it on the coincidence of the orchestra having been founded in the same year that he was born. But no excuse was needed at all to revisit the extraordinary wealth of wonderful songs that he produced.  Amongst hosts of others the words and music for My Heart Belongs to Daddy, Begin the Beguine, Night and Day and for the musicals Kiss Me Kate and High Society all fell from his talented pen and the talented Kim Criswell delivered them with aplomb.

Richard Strauss (not to be confused with Johann the waltz king) may have written any number of songs but it was his Four Last Songs that featured as one item on the RSNO's final concert of the subscription season.  This was the first time I had heard them live and I thought they were beautiful and so much better than on any recording I've ever heard.  The main work was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  The only trouble with this is that you can't really enjoy the first three movements because all you want to hear is the fourth in which the Ode to Joy is blasted out my a large choir.  It was good when it came and the opening piece of the programme whose name I've forgotten by a young woman whose name I have also forgotten and which was inspired by some flats being blown up recently in Glasgow was another blast.

Men in the trenches of the First World War lived with daily blasts of gunfire and bombs and many fell victim to shellshock as a result. This was the case for one of the three young soldiers whose experiences were dramatised in the National Theatre of Scotland's 306:Dawn.

306 is the number of men who were executed for cowardice during the war and dawn was when sentence was carried out.  Dawn was also when the first performance of the play took place in a barn a few miles outside Perth.  I went to a performance at a more usual time but I don't think the play can have lost much in atmosphere thanks to the exceptional performances, the fine music and an inspired presentation.

Here's a model of what was inside the barn.  The NTS has always favoured unconventional stages and this is no exception.

The seating areas are the dark clumps.  The action took place on the raised grey areas, in the passageways between them and on walkways behind the palisades of giant wooden rifles that surround the whole.

It's a very moving experience watching the men being overcome by the horror and stress of exposure to the brutality of warfare allied to the army's rigid and compassionless regime.  As the review in The Scotsman put it " At the end of the play, many in the audience will weep. There’s also a place, though, for a deep and implacable anger at the cruel, life-denying cult of death and killing that held this all-male culture in its grip. This is an indelibly powerful work of music theatre that will have that impact wherever it is performed, for many years to come."

I'm going to quote Joyce McMillan in the Scotsman again, this time about another WWI play that I saw at the Citizens and which puzzled me.  Observe The Sons Of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme she says "has never been a comfortable play for those who like things simple, in terms of culture, sexuality, or Irish politics".

I couldn't make up my mind whether the play was an exercise in bigging up Irish protestantism, which I found uncomfortable, or in likening the folly of prejudice to the folly of war.  I'm indebted to Mark Brown in The Telegraph for some enlightenment when in introducing his review of the production he says "Just as the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 was a historic juncture in the shaping of Irish Republican politics, so the Battle of the Somme was  formative in the evolution of its rival tradition, Ulster Loyalism."

As a theatre production it was excellent and I recommend reading both those reviews, Scotsman and Telegraph, as well as a little bit about Frank McGuinness its author for a better appreciation.

Maybe I should have done that before going to see it but I prefer to make up my own mind about things even when a bit of background might sometimes help.  I was in fact a bit worried when I went to see Scottish Ballet's Swan Lake because I had inadvertently read an uncomplimentary review of it in The Spectator a week or two beforehand.

Fortunately I enjoyed it for the most part although as Roger remarked the swans' costumes were somewhat unflattering, reminding him strongly of M&S underwear.  (You have to walk through a lot of that to get to the mens' department.)

That apart it all looked beautiful.  Actionwise Act 1 was a bit bland but when Act 2 got going,  and the black swan appeared with her henchmen it heated up.

Photo by Andy Ross

Some reviews didn't like it because it stripped out a lot of the traditional story.  My relative unfamiliarity with the ballet protected me from that concern and Thom Dibdin who clearly knows his ballet swept those concerns aside in his review.  And what is there not to like in Tchaikovsky's wonderful music.