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. 

 

I am not a gambler but I couldn't resist hazarding all the sterling I had in my pocket, which wasn't much, on buying a ticket to win a shiny red JAG as I passed through Edinburgh airport.

This car and ten grand to fill the tank with all for nine quid.  What a bargain - but I thought it was a straightforward raffle and instead there turned out to be a spot the ball element.  Given my history of locating the ball a million miles from its proper place in the Evening News my hopes are effectively dashed.

Some pictures from a weekend in Wester Ross 

I had the pleasure of hearing myself namechecked on French radio yesterday.

I'm a relatively frequent listener to their weekday programme Open Jazz.  They often run little competitions related to the theme of  the broadcast and you are invited to email in an answer.  Thanks to the wonder of the www the answers to questions about which you haven't a clue can be found and then it's down to getting your email in quickly enough.

A biopic about the Swedish jazz singer Monica Zetterlund opens in France today and she was the theme of yesterday's programme.  There were in fact two competitions.  Since the prize for the first one was tickets for the film I ignored it but I was all organised for the second.  I had the email set up with only the answer to stick in.  I had Wikipedia's entry for Monica open.  I had the IMDB page for the film open.

Came the question...where was the man who plays the pianist Bill Evans in the film born?  Quick as a flash I got the actor's name from IMDB, googled him, found a biog and bingo, plugged Anchorage into my email and hit send.

I can't claim to have awaited the result on tenterhooks.  In fact I was busy on the computer paying more or less no attention to the programme when I heard "nell".  That's me à la française.  Checking on the podcast I found I was the tenth of ten winners of the CD Sky/Lift by Randy Ingram, the actor who not only played Bill Evans but played the piano as well.

Isn't that great?

The theatre has offered up something of a variable feast for me recently.  Some shows that did well in the Fringe are doing the rounds as you might expect and I saw two of them at the Traverse.  I didn't like either of them and turned to the reviews of their successful beginnings to try to see what I'd missed.

In Gym Party we the audience are asked to vote for one of three contestants on the basis of their performance in games of a sort.  The three are dedicated to winning at any cost and losing results in nasty treatment.  The Guardian whose review gives it four stars compares it favourably to Fight Night, another show in which the audience decide who wins through.  For my money Gym Party was Punch and Judy knock about compared to the subtle manipulation displayed in Fight Night.  It was juvenile and brutish.  I didn't like it.

The eponymous protagonist of The Confessions of Gordon Brown didn't get enough votes to keep him in office and the show didn't get my vote either.  The Telegraph gave it four stars which is more praise than it ever gave its subject and they were wrong in both cases in my opinion.

I was looking forward to vigorous political satire along the trail blazed by That Was The Week That Was, Yes Minister, In The Thick Of It and the like.  But this was weak humour stretched thinly over an hour and forty minutes without respite.  It's tough for one man to move around a stage for that length of time without a degree of repetition but I screamed internally as he prowled pointlessly for the nth time upstage right almost but not quite leaving the set only to turn on his heel and come back.

My third outing was to another play that took TV talent shows as its model.  In Mama, quiero ser famoso the audience are the audience in a TV studio and vote on who should be proclaimed famous.  Strangely enough the people whose antics on stage we were treated to were not those who were subject to the audience's vote.  We were asked to choose between three audience members selected apparently at random by their ticket numbers on the basis of their response to the question why do you deserve to be famous.   They were plants of course but remarkably ill prepared.  Is that because this was a Spanish play presented by the Hispanic Studies department of the university and they were roped in on the night?

A student production it may have been but it was very well put together and hugely enjoyable despite the fact that a fair bit of the dialogue passed me by.  The cast acted with great energy and commitment especially one girl who sang about churros and strutted her stuff with aplomb.  She struck me as definitely talented.  And no company could have wished for a more enthusiastic audience.

Eternal Love is a play in which theological discourse and sexual passion play equal parts.  Abelard and Heloise are renowned as archetypal lovers and the play tells both their story and the story of the  struggle between faith and scientific enquiry that continues to this day.

An excellent production which was well received with an especial appreciation from both cast and audience for the understudy Kevin Leslie who came on for the indisposed Sam Crane.

Now it's the turn of Danish womanhood.

Outside the library this morning three Danish schoolgirls canvassed my opinion on Scottish independence. They told me they had come over to do this as part of a school project.

When we studied the economic geography of Fife at secondary school I think it was up to us individually to suss out whether the sugar beet fields described to us actually existed or not.  To be fair the school organised some trips.  We went to the Rothes Colliery which must have been all of ten miles away.  We went further afield one Easter holiday to spend a week near Abingdon studying (sort of) West Side Story and Salad Days.  

But this Scandinavian venture seems much more ambitious.

Sipping a coffee quietly between events at Stanza I was accosted by two young American girls who asked if I'd like to hear some poetry.  Following my acquiescence one treated me to poems by Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti while the second girl recited a piece of her own.  It was a good piece I think but can't remember a word of it.

I thought this must be some form of busking especially as one girl was clutching a paper cup that could have been a collecting cup.  She didn't thrust it at me but held it close to her body.  Assuming this to be from maidenly reticence I asked what was expected of me in return for their efforts. "Why! A poem" they said. 

Now I could have mustered a verse or two of Ode to a Haggis or made up a wee limerick on the lines of - There was a young girl at Stanza/who promised the boys a bonanza...

You get the idea.  But fortuitously I had just purchased a book of poetry by a poet I'd heard earlier so I whipped it out, leafed through and found something that seemed quite appropriate at the time though I'm not sure now that "Ululate my angels..." was entirely suitable.

Of course this turned out not to be busking but an integral part of the festival and I was recited to on two further occasions.

Of the half dozen events I went to I most enjoyed a session on World War I poets.  Kitted out in plastic replicas of tin helmets the young Dundee student members of Joot Theatre and a definitely more mature member of the company with flowing beard and khaki beret performed poems of the war.  A girl in period costume did all the lovelorn lass at home, weeping widow and encourager to take up arms bits. 

All the poets you might expect were featured; Sassoon, Owen, Brooke and so on.  But new to me and not featuring in this list of 25 poets of the First World War was Joseph Lee.  A Dundee man he was apparently well regarded in his time but the voices of others have drowned his out since.  He's well worth looking out for.  Here's a tiny but striking sample.

Every bullet has its billet;

Many bullets more than one:

God! Perhaps I killed a mother

When I killed a mother's son.

The loud bits of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique would have covered some of the throat clearing, coughing and snifling that beset me a few days ago but I decided at the last minute to give the concertgoing public a break and stayed at home with a hot toddy.

You could have cleared a hundred throats during Glasgow Girls at The Citizens the following day such was the amplified volume of what were already pretty loud numbers.

Half a dozen talented young women acted, sang and danced their way through this story of schoolgirls banding together in support of asylum seekers housed in Glasgow and whose children they were at school with.  Their special target was the so called dawn raids in which families were turfed out of their beds without warning in the early morning and hustled off south to detention and subsequent deportation.  

A serious subject but it made a great show not at all devoid of humour.  The two actors who played all the adult characters in the tale slipped from one personality into its polar opposite and back again within a heartbeat and with terrific skill.

Rain never seems to me to be in short supply by the banks of the Clyde but the Glasgow Girls umbrella twisting dance number relied on the rainy impression given by lighting in stark contrast to the real water cascading down on a similar number in Singin' in the Rain. That's a light and frothy show but had excellent singing and dancing and well....you have to admire all that water business.

Dick Lee and David Vernon on clarinet and accordion respectively were a pretty loud but enjoyable accompaniment to dinner at Vincaffe where a number of Sunday night events are scheduled. I was there with one of my U3A jazzmen and a group of his friends.  It was a foot-tapping evening in which delicious pasta was washed down with a nice Montepulciano.  I nobly foreswore dessert in anticipation of Austrian puddings to come.

On the last evening of the saxophone week at Knuston Hall participants are invited to entertain their fellow players and this year I was involved in a couple of performances.

For one of those someone pointed an ipad at us and this is the result.

Stuart, in the pork pie hat, knows what he's doing but the rest of us are taking a leap into the unknown.

Personally I think the video is better viewed with your eyes shut.

Looking at this picture you may well feel that the arrangement would have benefited from a greater degree of symmetry.  Should that tall green thing on the right not have been balanced by a similar green thing on the left.  And by Jove there's a planter it could have gone in.

Up until Saturday night your aesthetic sensibilities would have been satisfied but during the hours of darkness the leftmost plant walked.  A few dead leaves lay strewn by the lift door on Sunday morning and the plastic inner plant pot lay forlornly in the lift.  But of the plant inside or outside the building there was no trace.

Now it wasn't a Triffid so it didn't walk of its own accord.  I suspect that one of those joyful inebriates who thinks it's a jolly jape to put traffic cones on the heads of statues emerged from a neighbouring flat and swiped it.

If I get my hands on him (or her don't let's be sexist about this) I'll take pleasure in planting its twin just where it hurts. 

Taken in Tayport,on a visit to the "ootermaist boonds o Fife".

I am convinced that a poem exists containing that phrase but it draws a blank in Google and its anglicized version leads only to a 2009 post in this blog.  Does anyone know?

My visit to Tayport and other faraway spots helped fill an hour or two before a lunchtime concert in St Andrews, one of the dozen or so places in Fife hosting the Fife Jazz Festival.  In the past I've just nipped over to Fife and back but this year there were a number of gigs in St Andrews or thereby that attracted me and not relishing a journey home starting at 11pm I stayed over for a couple of nights.

The expedition was well rewarded with stomping New Orleans numbers from Chris Barber.  That's the music he loves best but he's added strength to the band to equip it to move forward a decade or two and play Duke Ellington.  There was even one daring foray into the late 50s for a Miles Davis tune.  But New Orleans is where his heart is and who would wish to deprive him or his fans of the pleasure of its music.  Still gigging at 84, he deserves a medal.  Actually he's probably already got one.

Alison Affleck and Vieux Carré according to their blurb on Soundcloud are "true to the whimsical, evocative and slightly cheeky attitude of the late 1920s" and "offer up a hearty and delicious good cheer performance".  That's pretty accurate but she did throw in a few downbeat numbers, which aren't hard to find when you're singing Billie Holiday.

In Biggar a few years ago I heard Colin Steele play Chet Baker's music in the intervals between a telling of the trumpeter's life.  It was a great show so I was looking forward to Remembering Chet that again featured Colin Steele on trumpet but with the accent on Baker's vocal legacy.  I wouldn't say I didn't enjoy it.  The performances were excellent but the songs tended to be all on the one level and were downbeat to the point of being soporific.

You couldn't have slept even in the very comfy armchairs of the Byre Theatre Studio where the very loud and lively modern jazz of Strangeness and Charm, led by Richard Ingham on saxophones and wind synthesizer provided a necessary counterweight to the abundance of more traditional music on offer.

There were other gigs I'd love to have gone to but you can't be in two places at once.  It was very gratifying to be in the place I was in, since the Byre closed suddenly about a year ago throwing much into disarray.  I'm told that this weekend didn't herald a permanent reopening.  It will be open again for Stanza, the poetry festival, in March. After who knows.  Keep your fingers crossed.

Something else was threatened with closure last year but is still open, the St Andrews botanic garden.  It was new to me despite having been to the town umpteen times.  It's lovely and I'm very glad that it's still open.

There's another light show in town.  It ends today so rush to the Old Quad to see the terracotta warrior lanterns that graced the Beijing Olympics.  Try to get there at dusk because only the bodies are lit internally so the heads disappear a bit in the dark except for a few that are spotlit.

The only adjective that describes A Long Day's Journey into Night is bleak.

This drama of drug addiction, drunkenness, illness, miserliness, failure and disintegration spans a day in the Tyrone's summer home by the sea in Connecticut.  In the background mist rolls in from the ocean to the forlorn boom of the foghorn.

It doesn't make for a fun night out but the Lyceum do this masterpiece of the American theatre very well.

In contrast, although the sea was pretty frisky at Portobello earlier in the day and the clouds lowered and the rain fell, the atmosphere in the Dalriada Bar was jovial as the U3A Jazz Group jammed it's way through a dozen or so standards.

I'm a recent recruit to this ensemble and despite not having much of a clue about what I'm doing am enjoying the experience.

Blink and you'll miss it is not generally true of the display of major art works but almost invariably I find myself doing a last minute rush.  So it was no surprise to find that I was kissing goodbye to Rodin's chunk of marble on its last day in Edinburgh.

En route to the gallery I passed through St Andrew Square and discovered that lights were being planted.

The planter told me that the lights would be switched on the following night so after band practice I wandered home via the square and pitted my little camera phone against the darkness, no doubt to the amusement of those with seriously big cameras on tripods. 

Here's roughly the same view with the lights on:

It's not wildly exciting I admit but you're not getting the full picture. Yet.

Tonight I was at the National Library listening to a talk in which much lyrical prose and poetry was spilt in praise of Arthur's Seat and Calton Hill.  One speaker expatiated on the landscape and drew a picture connecting the mythological beliefs associated with the hill to the progress of enlightened and radical thought exemplified by its various monuments.

He found it particularly interesting to think of how the statue of James Clerk Maxwell gazing from the end of George Street to the hill on which he had played as a boy stood for that continuity and progress.

Now far be it from me to rudely, self-importantly and childishly correct a distinguished speaker (and I didn't) but I was pretty sure that James is looking the other way.  And indeed he is as I verified on my way home.

However I might just pass this information on to the distinguished speaker since it strikes me as an even better story to describe him as turning his back on the old beliefs and truths of his childhood to venture out into the brave new world of electromagnetism that underpins the modern age.

Handily I was at the St Andrew Square end of George Street and even more handily I had a camera with me (pre-planned I confess) so I wandered through the lights and took a few snaps, not really much better than the phone snaps in fact, but then it struck me that the perfect spot to get the whole picture would be Harvey Nicks.  So I whizzed up to the bar/restaurant on the fourth floor (wittily called the Forth bar) and here's the result.

Naturally I felt impelled to justify my presence and mitigate the sin of displaying a John Lewis plastic bag by making a small purchase so I had a glass of a rather tasty Gewurtztraminer.  It came all the way from Chile which is not really surprising given the large part that Germans played in the European settlement of the country.  Indeed my Chilean friend of Danish ancestry was educated at a German school.  But it's the first Chilean that I've tasted.  Not likely to be the last.

If you want to know more about the artist behind the light you can buy his book at Harvey Nicks for a mere thirty five quid or a mini book for a little less than half that.