We are fortunate to have one of the best symphony orchestras in the country. Its home, Powell Hall, is 100 years old. While the acoustics are very good, the building is showing its age. It reopened this weekend after two years of restoration are redevelopment. A new building surrounds the old one on two sides, with a fresh lobby, rehearsal space, musicians locker rooms and a green room for visiting artists. The auditorium retains its cream and gold patina, with improved acoustics and much more comfortable seating. It’s a big deal to us.
Back home and a big change of scene. There is more to edit from Scotland but I’ll put those on Flickr.
There are two major Pride festivals in STL, a big parade downtown in June and a stationary event in Tower Grove Park in September. There were lots of folks who were out there. As happens often, it got so crowded it was hard to pick out individual people with my camera. This makes for a nice start, though.
The Old Town of Edinburgh sits on a ridge. It has a long central road, known as the Royal Mile, with meandering streets and alleys leading from it. Population and pestilence brought the city down the hill into the regular grid of New Town. We were grateful for our luck on the weather, given how wet it was when we arrived.
Statuary in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, two of the great figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. David Hume and Adam Smith. They were contemporaries and good friends, the eminent empiricist and the intellectual father of capitalism. (Wonderful book about the two of them, https://tinyurl.com/u48zhjkj.) My sympathies run more toward the former but their impact cannot be understated. Scotland is justifiably proud.
