My favourite thing about Pollock Halls is undoubtedly breakfast time. And a big breakfast was definitely necessary for the trip to Dundee for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra tonight.  The backstory: last week I met with Gabrielle the CEO of AWO (Australian World Orchestra) for hot chocolate, becoming their inaugural mentee for their new mentoring program helping young people explore music abroad. Alison Mitchell is my mentor, who was guest flute professor/my teacher at Sydney Con for my first year, and currently is back in action with SCO as principle player and soloist tonight. I was also presented with a bonus of 30 pounds in cash to spend on more hot chocolate, after signing my name to some terms and conditions which works on the small condition that I keep a written blog.

So this morning, I ate three eggs cooked three different ways, giant wild mushrooms and grilled kipper. I sat with a Russian girl who drank two coffees and appeared to be 20 but was actually 13. In the afternoon I took a bus into the city centre costing one pound and fifty pence, which clanged into a tin till box, and took a seat on the tartan bus-seats. A man on the bus offered me to help me find my way to the station. He was really funny but a bit odd; he mixed beer and lemonade into a plastic bottle shakily on the bus ride, said “Gesundheit!” when I sneezed and wore a rainbow hippy shirt, and also smelled rather interesting. He was extremely friendly, but nevertheless I made a snap decision to abandon him by moving carriages. (Sometime in year 7 I got chased by a smelly homeless man in the botanic gardens and had to go to the police station. After that incident a woman, I can’t remember who, gave me some important life advice; that it is always to safer to sit with another woman).

I sat down next to a girl about my age coming back from college with her ears plugged in and her fruit salad and bag of makeup. There was a small and inquisitive Scottish school-boy and his brother and mother opposite us. He stood up on his chair to see what I was drawing in my book, then decided to colour in his own book, then talked about all the food he wanted to eat on his train trip, including a cheese sandwich, cheese chips, and cheese crackers; this eventually dissolved into a silly song about cheese hot chocolate. I also suddenly remembered some childhood memories of a Scottish neighbour I once had when we first moved to Sydney, three years younger than me, that scared the living daylights out of me and my brother by constantly running into our backyard and asking incessant questions. I loved his Jack-Russell puppy Bindi however, and frequently visited his house, although I always forgot its gender. Anyway, the train trip was altogether lovely, and I finished one picture of an old house on the street near my halls. Outside, clouds appeared massive, grey and grumpy.

When I arrived in Dundee, I followed signs to the city centre, passed several construction sites and eventually reached the central Dundee bus interchange. Dundee has a nifty bus transit system with an electronic system telling commuters the live updated times of buses arriving and as scheduled I took the 73b bus heading to Gardyne theatre at exactly 6.10pm. I was quite impressed with myself when I arrived at my destination half an hour early, considering my bad track record of public transport. At the theatre, a ticket was reserved for me which made me feel quite special as I skipped the queue. Alison even comes out to greet me and we both agreed that it felt so weird and nice meeting up here in an entirely different context! Alison was wearing the shirt and jeans she always wore in Sydney, which made me happy somehow. I sat with her husband John, who has a really thick Scottish accent and is so bubbly and friendly, and makes jokes to many people about his career as a ‘domestic engineer’ with all of Alison’s busy touring schedule, though he himself does marketing and photography for SCO as well.

The concert began with Leo Weiner’s Divertimento No 1, Op 20. I can’t say I’d heard of Weiner nor did I dare to ask “so who is this Weiner guy?” – so I listened and found out! There were five character pieces strung together which from the outset are infused with a folky lilt. It is particularly charming and rugged and rustic and the orchestra got really into it, in ‘a good czardas’, a tavern dance, they all sway as the music got more and more drunk, until the ‘oom-pah oom-pah’ bit where a second violinist gets trick by a false ‘pah’ in a rest, and I think I hear the conductor (Gergely Madras) and lots of restrained ruddy laughing faces in the orchestra. At the end of the movement, a good chuckle was elicited from the audience.

The Weiner really suited the chamber orchestra, who were like a tightly-knit family. I really liked the principal players immediately, and the way they led their sections in. The lead cellist and lead double bassist, I decided in my head, had either studied jazz, or had been naturally gifted with a lot of swag. Even the lead second violinist who appeared to be quite pregnant dug deep with her bow, and I imagined her baby inside her having a jolly old time like the rest of the Dundeenians (I love this name so much) around me. Reception was extremely warm and the theatre was full, which made John and the orchestra management team really happy considering Dundeenians are generally so-so with their concert attendance. Everyone at interval was abuzz with talk about bringing SCO back to Dundee again soon.

The next piece was the Ibert Concerto for flute and orchestra, which I had literally been waiting over eight months to hear since I last saw Alison. Seeing your teacher perform is always such a funny experience because you already are intimately familiar with their sound and their ideas on music, yet it’s like you’ve never seen them before when they walk onto stage in front of an orchestra and a conductor and physically demonstrate all the ideas that you talk about in lessons. Her tone was just as I remembered, fresh and clear and sweet.

The second movement was delicious – my favourite movement. A flute/clarinet dialogue in the second half melted my heart a wee bit. The third movement was explosive. I liked how the program notes described it as ‘a jazzy Allegro scherzando’ and liked Ibert’s quote on the composition as “the expression of an interior adventure”.  The Ibert Concerto is so technically challenging that it became a test piece for the Paris Conservatoire. I started looking at it a couple of years ago but am still very much learning the notes. All those tricky bits so knitted up in my own muscle memory, flowed effortlessly and with exacting delivery from Alison, and Madaras really pushed the orchestra on with her  to an explosive finish. Madaras, I learned later, is also a flautist.

After having mingled at the orchestra reception, and two orange juices later, the Eroica was performed. It was the first time I had heard this symphony live, and it sounded much different being played by a chamber orchestra. This being said, it wasn’t the usual epic bits in the symphony that had the strongest effects on me but rather small things I had not noticed before. Alison played first flute and it was really interesting to listen to how the woodwind section matched their articulation exactly. There was a bit of a magic moment in the last movement for me when the principle string players had a quartet bit, in which Madaras stopped conducting and let the principles do their thing. At the end the orchestra received hearty rounds of applause.

Right afterwards I hopped backstage with John and met the conductor and saw some of the players who are all buzzing and packing up to go home from the last concert on their SCO tour. Everyone wished each other well, bid their goodnights and farewells and thank-yous in various accents before speeding off down the highway. Alison and John gave me a back-seat tour of rural Scotland as we head back to Edinburgh together. Along the way, we talked about the weather, the change of Australia’s Prime Minister, and the latest news at Sydney Con. I slept deeply, and happily.