To properly enjoy a Festival day you've got to feel that you're packing a lot in.  I did my best yesterday with a day weighted on the musical side.

I kicked off with an excellent show by Shrewsbury and Severn opera.  The Lost Domain is a dramatisation of a novel by Alain Fournier who was killed early in the First World War.  It's a story of youthful love and the search, ultimately unsuccessful, for the happiness of the past.

The young cast sing, dance and act with skill and commitment.  They faithfully convey the emotional truth of the tale in a well choreographed, costumed and staged production that makes good use of projection on the cyclorama, that sweeps on and off simple but effective settings and is an object lesson in how to deploy a large cast on the Adam House stage.

Music and lyrics?  Excellent.

I must read the book thought I and lo and behold it's a school text in France freely accessible here.

Then I nipped across to the museum to enjoy a free concert by the Erskine string quartet. The Erskine in question is the sixth Earl of Kellie, an 18th century composer and they played some of his music as well as some 21st century classical stuff and rounded things of with an arrangement of two of Phil Cunningham's accordion pieces.  Nothing if not eclectic.

Down at the Book Festival I enjoyed two authors talking about their books on 21st century India.  It's 30 years since my sole visit to India and there have been such momentous changes that it would probably spoil my memories of the place to go back.  Asked why, given the not so very nice picture of many aspects of life in Delhi he paints he continues to live there, Rana Dasgupta pointed to the energy of the city.  All is change and forward movement.  It makes Europe seem effete and worn out.

John Keay's Midnight's Descendants sounded a good read too if rather more academic. 

The Kronos Quartet have long been amongst my favourites.  In a show called Beyond Zero they played rather mournful music, initially alone, and then accompanied by a film collage of First World War archival footage of troops parading, troops embarking, troops attacking, tanks lumbering over the landscape, biplanes dogfighting and suchlike nastiness.

It certainly left you in no doubt that the war was a sad and bad thing but then personally I was in no doubt about that beforehand so it was perhaps a case of preaching to the converted.

You'd expect film of that era to be jerky and spattered with little black spots and similar noise but here a great deal of artificial blemishes had been superimposed in the manner of rapidly changing semi opaque blue and sepia Rorschach tests.  The effect was no doubt wonderfully evocative of the blast of bombs and gunfire but it pained my eyes to the extent of spoiling the show for me.  The wildly enthusiastic applause proved me to be in a minority.

Before I got to Kronos I stopped off in the New Town to see a friend's art exhibition and was treated to a glass of wine.  I'm sure that was a friendly gesture rather than a marketing ploy. I left empty-handed not without regrets over a couple of the pieces.  I could have made an offer I suppose.