The Herald

Music Bbc Sso, Parnu Concert Hall, Estonia 4/5 Stars

NOW THAT was more like the thing. Incredibly for a town of fewer than 50,000 souls, Parnu has a new purpose-built concert hall of classic shoebox design seating fewer than 1000 which is acoustically superb. Where better then for Ilan Volkov to road-test a showpiece program? Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements is a bold opener and the lively sound - woodwind superbly clear over an exemplary string section - has the orchestra's conductor keeping the brass in check.

Billboard

Soloist back home GUEST soloist with the Scottish Ensemble on its next tour (which opens next Thursday in the Strathclyde Suite of the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall) will be the superlative Scots pianist, Steven Osborne. Once a local Linlithgow boy made good, he's now a real star on the international touring circuit.

Box Up Your Manolos: The End Is Nigh

HELLO boys. Ever wanted to ram-raid B&Q and run amok among the adjustable screw drivers? Talk about football until your ears bleed? Play de Niro in front of the mirror? Well, tonight is the night when your dreams really can come true. As the final episode of Sex and the City airs, a hefty slice of the female population will be otherwise engaged, blind to what you are up to. The streets are yours. In truth, I am only half- mourning the departure of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte. Like...

Music Brian Kellock: Brazil 1930s, Henry's Jazz Cellar, Edinburgh 3/ 5 Sta

There seem to be no limits to the variety of musical styles that Brian Kellock can bring to life with understanding and accomplishment. Jazz masters Fats Waller and Willie "The Lion" Smith have been among recent subjects for celebration in themed performances that allowed this outstanding pianist's natural exuberance to shine through. The music up for scrutiny here, although from a similar era, brought out an entirely different side to Kellock's character.

Stickler Brown has Earned His Chance to Be Premier

THERE are times, travelling back from another Gordon Brown budget, groaning under the weight of another fat red book and its associated trail of consultation papers, discussion papers and sundry worthy studies into the state of the nation's health, housing or whatever, when the present chancellor of the exchequer can seem like the worst kind of forest-crunching policy wonk. Three decades back, in the foothills of his political career, the Gordon Brown approach to policy-making was an ever-pre...

The Diary

Too dear, Dora FILM and stage veteran Dora Bryan was heading to the bar of the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow after her one-woman show this week when a member of staff, on the phone to her mother, boldly asked if Dora would say hello to her mum. Graciously putting down her campari and soda, Dora took the phone and chatted away to the girl's mother, telling her it was a pity she was unable to get along to the show. And the mum, with Glaswegian honesty, told Dora that it wasn't that she couldn't ...

Silence and the Visual Art of Noise

An exploration of the noises from the bleaker side of many lives forms the basis for a new exhibition. Incommunicado is an exhibition that begins in utter silence, with a single photograph, and ends in a series of artworks that generate a cacophony of sounds: telephones ringing, posh gallery receptionists bleating at each other across apparently crossed wires and the emphatic enunciation of helmet-haired CNN anchors. The thing about silence in the age of communication is that it's just so dam...

Music Sco, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh 4/5 Stars

The art of programme structure was again in evidence when Mendelssohn's First Piano Concerto was cleverly encircled by music which in various ways had special links with it. To hear this concerto, a work often dismissed as of no great consequence, presented with this sort of seriousness by a Canadian pianist (Louis Lortie) and a Swedish conductor (Arnold Ostman) who clearly believed in it was greatly refreshing. Its startlingly progressive features, which often pass in the heat of the moment,...

Performance Chinese Whispers, Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3/5 Stars

Citizenship is one of those vogueishly meaningless words hijacked by well-meaning arts mandarins and other worthies for oblique enterprises of their own design. For Anglo-Malaysian performance poet Francesca Beard, however, identity crises of a cultural kind are an everyday occurrence. Taking the experience as her starting point for a show that takes in quantum physics, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, six degrees of separation and a make-believe q&a session with the audience, Beard has created a sm...

Glasgow Buses

I attended First Glasgow's "comprehensive induction programme which incorporates customer care". We were told that First is only interested in running on routes that are profitable, be courteous and polite at all times, wear your tie done up, and the way to deal with difficult situations is don't get involved. I would welcome the company's advice on how I should have dealt with the two drunk teenagers in the Gorbals one evening who offered to cut my hands off when I asked them to get off. As ...

More Than a Sporting Chance Glasgow Deserves Success in Bid for National Complex

The finishing line is in sight, but who will emerge victorious? The prize is glittering - up to (pounds) 50m in Scottish Executive money to put towards the cost of a new national indoor arena and regional sports facilities. There are several competitors. The end of this month is the deadline for submissions. The executive is expected to identify the winner in June. To suggest that Glasgow City Council's bid should be so far out in front as to be a dead certainty is not to seek to rig the race...

Cuts Should Start with Political Advisers

IF Chancellor Gordon Brown wants to make savings to fund improvements in public services by cutting the number of civil servants, I suggest he starts with political advisers. These "spin doctors" are not recruited by open competition nor are they politically neutral, both of which are requirements for career civil servants, yet we are paying them as if they were. Why should they be paid out of the public purse rather than the Labour Party whose policies they are employed to show in the best p...

In Scotland's Interests; More to Politics Than Keeping Downing Street Happy

Gordon Brown's announcement in Wednesday's budget of cuts among administrative staff in three government departments had been well trailed. It was the scale of the job losses that was surprising - more than 40,000 over the next four years. Efficiency savings of 2.5% a year are also to be implemented throughout Whitehall. If Jack McConnell thought he could forget about potential implications for Scotland because the departments concerned were responsible for reserved policy areas, he was badly...

Briefing: Kreteks

Despite health warnings, Indonesians are showing no signs of giving up on their favourite weed. Q: What are kreteks?

Confused and in Need of a History Lesson

Having read the great volume of letters recently in The Herald concerning Iraq and now Madrid I confess to becoming more confused by the minute. I was under the impression that al Qaeda had perpetrated 9/11 from their base in Afghanistan and that they had little if any interest in Iraq or, indeed, Israel. I was under the impression that world opinion broadly favoured the American-led coalition that rather effectively terminated Mr bin Laden's empire. I was also under the impression that Mr bi...

Becoming More Confused by the Minute

David Stevenson is correct in his assessment of Alan Wyper's recent letter on the EU governments who opposed Bush and Blair (Letters, March 18). The Spanish people may quite properly take offence at comments emanating from various faceless Washington "insiders" that, in rejecting the corrupt and manipulative Aznar administration, they have taken on the role of "appeasers". The Spanish are not alone, however. At much the same time as the Speaker of the House of Representatives was defaming the...

The Case for Retaining Small Hospitals

I write to support the case for the retention of small Scottish hospitals made by the representatives of consultants and GPs in Belford Hospital, Fort William and Lochaber (Letters, March 15). Their comment that most general surgical and medical cases can be appropriately managed in smaller NHS hospitals is supported by a large body of evidence. The most comprehensive study of the relationship of hospital size and number of patients treated to clinical outcomes was carried out by the Centre f...

To Defend an Open Society From Closed Minds

THE obscenity of 200-plus dead in Madrid proved insufficient to temper the readiness of some of your correspondents for personal invective rather than reasoned debate on how we best respond to the threat posed to western democracies from the new global terrorists. There was no mention in my letter e-mailed to you on Sunday, March 14, of the Spanish election results for the very reason that the results had not yet been declared (Thomas McLaughlin's letter, March 17). I am delighted that the PS...

From the Herald Archives

25 YEARS AGO A CLASSIC confrontation between international energy needs and a threatened, but resolute, community looms. The South of Scotland Electricity Board claims the right to prospect and possibly mine radioactive uranium on the mainland of Orkney in "the national interest". The Orcadians, backed by their council, have refused planning permission for test boring. 50 YEARS AGO

Sandy Goudie; 'I Have Always Lived Through My Art'

Sandy Goudie, one of the best-known and most talented painters to have graced the Scottish art scene in many decades, has died at the age of 70 in Glasgow, after a short illness. His youthful bearing and apparel always belied his age. The large 1977 painting of the artist's family, with his children Budoc, Gwen and Lachlan (being nursed by his mother), is at once tender and boldly handled, but it also demonstrates courage in another sense. It was painted in the largest Victorian house of its ...