I went off to Keswick for the weekend.  The town was stowed out with visitors as usual and as usual there was a bit of rain.  Not too much and what there was added to the autumnal beauty of the place.

Here are a couple of pictures I took on a stroll by the lake.  Lovely spot is it not?

I rushed back to Edinburgh on the Monday for band practice.  With a concert coming up in December and my difficulties with the pieces we are playing I can't afford to miss more practices than is absolutely necessary.

How wonderful it would be to play as well as members of the SCO, or any good orchestra for that matter.  Their concert this week featured a tremendous new work, a viola concerto by John McLeod.  This world premiere featured the SCO's principal viola player, Jane Atkins.  Called Nordic Fire it lived up to the monicker, hurtling flashes of energetic brilliance from the viola through a solid orchestral groundwork.

The concert started on a Nordic note with the very pleasant and tuneful Holberg suite by Greig and finished with an orchestral version of a Beethoven quartet.  Best left as a quartet in my view.

I went with Claire and Maddy to the NTS/Citizens production of Cyrano de Bergerac.    It was an evening on which a large proportion of the people I know in Edinburgh were also at the show.  It was very good though I thought some of the opening scene could have been done away with.  It's an English version by Edwin Morgan so it's a good text and the production was high-spirited and imaginative with the Lyceum's stage laid bare to its back wall and wings.  While wonderful to look at that vastness may have led to some of the lines floating up into the grid rather than out to the audience.

Since I went to India years ago the country has continued to hold a fascination for me so I was attracted to a talk at the museum called A Punjabi Jewel in the British Crown?  It was an excellent, rapid and sweeping review of relations between the East India Company (and later the British govenment and Queen Victoria) and the Sikhs in the persons of Ranjit Sing, his son Duleep and grandaughter Sophia.

I was familiar with much of the story though I'd forgotten rather a lot but wasn't at all familiar with Sophia.  She was a most interesting character, living an aristocratic life but demonstrating as a suffragette and working as a nurse in the first war.  I'd like to learn more.

In a bout of Francophilia a few weeks ago I joined the French Institute and today enjoyed the first fruits of my investment at a free screening of a super film called Les Grands Esprits.  Denis Podalydès plays a teacher at one of Paris's top schools.  At a cocktail do he propounds the view that what the poorly performing state schools in the banlieue need is an influx of experienced and highly competent teachers like himself.  Little does he know that he's addressing these remarks to someone from the Ministry of Education and finds himself being inveigled into putting his ideas into practice himself.

Of course it's not an immediate success.  His relations with the pupils are not good.  But this is a warm and delightful comedy in which a happy ending is inevitable.  So he brings the pupils round becoming a better person in the process.  I admit to having a tear my eye as the closing credits rolled.

This could be my Wednesday afternoon treat throughout the winter.  That would get my membership money's worth.  And it's not a bad place to eat.

Having saved this painting for the nation, admittedly not single-handed, I was happy to trot along to the National Gallery to hear a talk about it followed by a wee swally.

The talk was very interesting indeed so I followed it up enthusiastically a week or so later with Art and the Jacobites.  Not as it turned out nearly as interesting.  Frankly boring, but the evening was saved by scampi and chips plus some pleasant plonk with chums at the New Club.

Yet more art.  I squeezed in a visit to the Rembrant exhibition that had been running all summer just a day or two before it closed.  All that dark Flemish stuff is not entirely to my taste but they can work miracles with zones of light in the darkness and I do like portraits of which there were many.

I went from Rembrant to the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition which has just opened.  It's a spledid collection mostly of posters advertising the attractions of fin du siècle nightlife.  There are some scratchy recordings of the stars of the day to listen to.  I'm sure that in the right place at the right time they were a wow.

That scampi was not my only eating out experience this month.  I've eaten Swiss alpine dumplings in Leith - very tasty; had an excellent French lunch with former workmates; had a mediocre French lunch elsewhere and a pleasant Scottish pre-theatre dinner before Mathew Bourne's Swan Lake.  That's an absolutely wonderful show and so sexy. What an imagination and what thrilling and accomplished dancing.  A couple of the dancers walked past me as I waited for a bus the following morning and I was quite excited to see them.

I much enjoyed hearing Francois Leleux playing the oboe with the SCO last season so it was a pleasure to hear him again.  He played Haydn's oboe concerto which was fine but I actually enjoyed other works on the programme more, notably some Brahms.  More Haydn popped up at another SCO concert.  This time a chorale work, The Seasons.  It was grand.  The chorus sang their hearts out and the soloists were great.   

I heard Catriona Morison sing during the Festival and she was back in Edinburgh this monthe to sing Shéhérazade by Ravel in a splendid RSNO concert under their new Music Director Thomas Søndergård.  He's not a new face for Usher Hall audiences because he has been Principal Guest Conductor for a few years.  He swung into action as the boss with Mahler and Beethoven and followed that up with Grieg and Rachmaninov in the concert that featured Catriona Morison.  I enjoyed both those concerts and were I not nursing a cold in the hopes of it not spoiling my weekend in Keswick I'd be in the Usher Hall again tonight.

I don't know if I can blame my cold on the days I went without central heating while a new boiler was installed but those were cold days in contrast to the mild days that followed, on which the heating seldom came on.  Whatever, my various domestic bits and pieces are gradually reaching the end of their days and being replaced.  A groaning toilet cistern is next in line.

On one of those mild days I sat drinking in the sun with Andrew who happened to be in Edinburgh and was happy to chew the fat with me while Rosemary got on with the serious business of shopping.

I'm catching an early train for my weekend away and luckily I went to collect my pre-purchased tickets today because the machine went through all the motions and told me that it was printing them but disgorged no tickets.  I had to run around a bit to eventually get a man to open the machine and pull them out.  No way I'd have been at the station sufficiently long in advance of my train for that.

Spotted this splendid bird on the hunt for a snack in the Water of Leith.

 

In a mood of hexagonal nostalgia I joined the French Institute the other day.  I suppose I should say re-joined because I have been a member in the past though in my heyday of theatrical activity there in the 90s I don't think I was.  Anyway I toddled off to their celebration of European Language Day which was not too exciting. There was a little quiz, harmless enough, then half-hour taster sessions of a limited number of languages.  The only one that promised me anything new was the Polish one so I went and it was fun in a mild sort of way.

There were refreshments. A pale shadow of the feasts that used to be laid on in Randolph Crescent.  Has austerity accompanied the move to their new premises on George IV Bridge?  I left clutching a pile of leaflets hoping that there are better days there to come.

That same evening I went with Claire and Ross to see Manpower at the Traverse preceded by a delicious bowl of chicken livers at Nandos.  That nosh pleasure saw me through a tiresome show whose raison d'être was lost on me.  Fortunately Claire was reviewing it so now I know.  Generous as ever she gave it two stars.   Joyce McMillan was there as well and on the Scotsman website under her byline it gets four stars but no supporting text.  Very odd.

Also very odd by most measures and the very reason I went to it was a gig featuring the American saxophonist Colin Stetson.  Described as experimental he does all sorts of things with the bass

saxophone except perhaps play music.  The best I could say about it was that it was better than his support band.  To be fair some of his stuff on Youtube is listenable to and this video in which he explains what he's doing is interesting.

At least thanks to meeting a sax playing friend who had arrived early I got a seat.  The Dissection Room being on this occasion as on many others essentially a standing space.