The new cultural and education seasons are now well underway and I have been putting my bum on the seats of various theatres, concert halls and classrooms.

The Lyceum has a very sparkling looking set of worthwhile plays this year with a brand new show for openers.  Kill Johnny Glendenning garnered a fistful of four star reviews and the audience at the performance I attended clearly loved it.  I thought it was dire.  It always pains me to see such talent, hard work, skill and money devoted to trivia.  But with those reviews it will hopefully have brought many punters in and filled the theatre's treasure chest and with any luck those happy punters will come back to see the better stuff that's on offer.

Mahler and Shostakovich are amongst my favourite composers and have featured in the concerts I've been to so far.  I'm not particularly familiar with Bruckner and thoroughly enjoyed his massive 7th Symphony.  Apart from a short burst of cymbal clashing and frenetic triangle bashing in the third movement there is almost no percussion but with seventeen brass players on hand he gets a great deal of noise out.  Perhaps the piece I've enjoyed most though and which was completely unknown to me was Christoper Rouse's Flute Concerto.  It's absolutely lovely.  There are several performances on Youtube.  Try this one.

It almost makes me want to have a go at learning to play the flute but I've already launched on a Clarinet for Beginners evening class.  I so often see saxophonists double on clarinet that I'd thought I might have a go.  So far (two lessons in) it's not been too tricky and my fingers still go to the right places on the sax so no adverse impact yet.

One of my sax endeavours has just collapsed.  The guy who was running the U3A jazz improvisation group has packed it in and I don't think anyone else in the group is capable of replacing him.  I'm not too disappointed.  I got into it more or less by accident and my improvisational skills and knowledge were manifestly inadequate for the repertoire.  The improvisation work I do with my teacher is more in tune with my abilities and with the passage of time, touch wood, I'll be more up to the job of playing in a group.

But now I've got my Wednesday afternoons back and am already looking forward to devoting some of them to going to the cinema, something I've neglected for a while.  Mind you I'm not neglecting it this weekend.  I saw A Most Wanted Man yesterday, an excellent spy movie and then sat up late to re- watch Shine with its brilliant central performance by Geoffrey Rush.  David Helfgott, the subject of the film was troubled by mental illness and La Herida which I saw earlier in the evening screened within the Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival also dealt very interestingly and movingly with the topic.

Moving too was the plight that many of Edinburgh's 20,000 odd Spanish residents find themselves in as depicted in the documentary En Tierra Extraña, another of the festival films.  Unable to find work at home many thousands of young Spaniards have gone abroad, many of them to Edinburgh where despite having enough degrees to throw a stick at they knuckle down to working as cleaners, dishwashers or whatever.  And they are not all young.  The people featured included a 52 year old woman with hardly a word of English who left hearth and home to look for better things.  I recognised one face on the screen as a man who drives the airport bus.  I don't suppose having a PhD (or whatever qualification he has) hinders him but it might be seen as a waste.  It's certainly a waste of the treasure spent by the Spanish state on education. I haven't found anything in English about it on the web but if your Spanish is up to it here's an article.

On the dance floor I have not been but a touring production of Top Hat was and so was Scottish Ballet.  I enjoyed both shows very much.  Richard Burton's deep rich voice reciting poems by Dylan Thomas in Scottish Ballet's Ten Poems ran the risk of overshadowing what was happening on stage but the choreographer and dancers rose to the challenge  of interpreting the poems as we listened.  This was paired with The Crucible.  Now I've been in Miller's play and know it quite well so I understood what was going on but there was no way in which a stranger to the story could have followed all its narrative thread, partly because it wasn't all there of course.  What could you do in 40 minutes.  But it was compelling and beautiful dancing so who's complaining.  Not me and not really The Guardian.

Top Hat was an entirely different kettle of fish and the entire story such as it is fitted comfortably into the evening.  I loved it and some may accuse me of double standards because if Kill John Glendenning is trivia then surely Top Hat is too.  True it is as they say not Shakespeare; but even taking away the music, the well-known songs, the well-worn old jokes, the wonderful dancing, and the sheer glitter of it all there is a kernel of human feeling and reality that the Lyceum's play simply lacks.