Drumelzier
Last night I was at a very cheering gig where West End Baroque were playing Purcell and some 18th-century Scottish music in a room above a pub. If you half-shut your eyes it looked a bit like an Edinburgh Enlightenment drawing room, or it would have if the Sainsbury’s signs hadn’t been shining in from the 24 hour garage across the road. And the music sounded great in a small room, which had the right acoustic, and allowed for an appropriate informality for sharing music between friends rather than setting up a ceremonial divide between performers and audience. Whether such a laid-back setup playing chamber music to small audiences can make financial sense to working musicians is perhaps another matter, but getting the artistic sense right should usually come first anyway.

Also on the balance between financial and artistic sense, in amongst the chaos at Scottish Opera in the last couple of weeks, the emergence of a strategy document prepared by its now departed music director that suggested building the company’s repertoire around Mozart and Verdi reminded me of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s founding aims 40 years ago to play ‘the Viennese repertoire’. Both notions seem quaintly old-fashioned now, and the SCO has certainly moved way beyond such limited ambitions. But has anyone had the debate about whether Scotland’s most expensive cultural public investment (ScotOp taking about £6m) should be grounded in Mozart and Verdi? The old assumptions that ‘the classics are good for you’ just don’t cut it any more. Arguably, it’s the lack of reliance on an established canon that has made the National Theatre of Scotland a much more interesting artistic proposition than it otherwise might have been.

On Wednesday I visited Dawyck Botanic Garden for the first time in about 20 years and it is just as spectacular as ever: after three hours, staring in wonder at trees was still completely fascinating. And given that Columba is supposed to have converted Merlin to Christianity just a few hundred yards from where I’m sitting, it was great to get one of these in the post this morning …