If violinist Laura Samuel, previously co-founder of the award-winning Belcea Quartet, had any misconceptions about the varied life she would have as leader of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, well, she kens noo.
This evening she is concertmaster at St Mary's Church in Haddington on the last weekend of the Lammermuir Festival as the orchestra is shoe-horned into the kirk to play Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, Elgar's Enigma Variations and the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss with soprano Christine Brewer, under the baton of Martyn Brabbins. Last Saturday, by way of contrast, she was at the front of the band for Proms in the Park in Glasgow where the singers were Katherine Jenkins and Noah Stewart, the repertoire rather broader, and the acoustic less enviable.
In fact the transition was even more abrupt because, less than 24 hours after the Glasgow Green gig, she led a chamber orchestra of SSO players and freelances under the name of the Lammermuir Festival Players in Haddington. And the musical contrast there was even greater, moving overnight from playing "lollipops" to the contrasting 20th-century devotional music of Arvo Part and Maurice Durufle, whose Requiem was given a sensational performance by the National Youth Choir of Scotland.
But this is not a prelude to praise for the astonishingly adaptable BBC SSO, whose future has exercised some major musical minds on The Herald's letters pages this past week - I have already had my tuppence worth on that. Some of the highlights of Lammermuir, including tonight's concert, are being recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3, which you would do well to listen out for, because that is the sort of task the broadcasting corporation does singularly well.
The Proms Last Night, on the other hand, was the sort of event where its ambition and the realpolitik of the UK now causes Auntie to get her knickers in a twist. The BBC Two early evening opt-out, leaving the interesting first half of the Royal Albert Hall concert on radio only while BBC Scotland transmitted from Glasgow, was one thing, but when it came to the last 20 minutes (Rule Britannia/Land Of Hope and Glory/Jerusalem) someone had decided that the music was too incendiary for the outdoor audience in Scotland and Wales, although fine for Belfast and, naturally, Hyde Park across the road.
As presenter Katie Derham stressed that everything that was happening everywhere was available somewhere online or on the red button (where you could catch a fine Hyde Park set by Earth Wind & Fire), the whole broadcasting hokey-cokey entered the realms of farce. Elsewhere in the world, different platforms are home to different sorts of television, but here the BBC can look like a juggler running out of hands.
After Thursday's voting, one can only hope that cleverer minds than mine (and that of culture minister Sajid Javid, whose remarks about the unifying effect of the Last Night suggested he hadn't read the Radio Times) are already working on a better plan.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article