An evening with Bach and Vivaldi

My life in Edinburgh is so different from life at home - so much so that it’s strangely like being on holiday, the kind of holiday that makes you exhausted but cheerful at the day’s end…

Today brought another football match (we won, though after we’d had to leave) and a wonderful concert in the venue I’m blipping. This is the Church of St Mary, Haddington - Wikipedia has this to say: “Building work on the church was started in 1380, and further building and rebuilding has taken place up to the present day. It is the longest church in Scotland, at 206 feet (62.8 metres) from east to west,[1] and is in the early Gothic style.

The musicians were the Dunedin Ensemble under the direction of John Butt, playing Bach and Vivaldi, and they were simply wonderful. I was fascinated by the complete absence of chin rests on the violins and spikes on the cellos. But almost more than anything else I loved the fact that all the violins were played by women, impressive, gifted women, as well as the women who played horns (not a valve in sight) and woodwind, and they were terrific.
Now I must be off - an early start tomorrow to see ... a rugby match. RUGBY?