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.