Arts Diary: Banker’s loan of a Stradivarius is in tune with earning a few notes from Benedetti

IT’S no secret that violinist Nicola Benedetti can charm the birds from the trees with her virtuoso fiddling, but it seems her powers also extend to charming wealthy bankers into lending her priceless musical instruments. This week it emerged that the 24-year-old Scot has been loaned a £6.3 million Stradivarius by London-based money man Jonathan Moulds, on the condition that she agreed to play for him and his friends “a few times a year”.

Obviously it’s a good deal for Benedetti – what young violinist wouldn’t want to get their hands on one of the top 30 violins in the world? But it strikes me that Moulds was the one who really got himself a bargain here – to be expected, I suppose, from Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s European president. You don’t get a job title like that unless you know how to grow your assets.

By attaching the Benedetti brand name to his instrument, he certainly won’t be doing its value any harm, and if it gets damaged in the line of duty … well, I suspect he has it insured. Oh, and he gets a few private performances from one of the most in-demand young musicians on the planet into the bargain. This guy can manage my money any day.

RSNO dear ...

SOMETHING funny’s been going on with the RSNO’s website. When I checked it the other day, I couldn’t find anything about their forthcoming performances of Brahms’s mighty German Requiem or, indeed, anything about their much talked-about visit to Shetland – just a blank screen with a link inviting me to “meet the hottest brunettes in Leeds”.

Wondering if perhaps there was something wrong with my computer, I asked a colleague to try visiting the orchestra’s website and report back. She received a slightly more general invitation to “meet a hottie in Leeds”. Of course, neither of us followed these links – not because we weren’t convinced by the hotness of the hotties of Leeds, no doubt they are indescribably hot – we just didn’t want to get into trouble with The Scotsman’s IT department.

Anyway, that was last week, but at time of writing the RSNO site still isn’t working properly (although now there’s just a line saying “Warning – visiting this website may harm your computer!”). So what’s going on? Have the hotties of Leeds broken into RSNO HQ and taken over? Has the RSNO been forced to start up an online dating service in order to pay for this year’s Proms?

According to a spokesman for the orchestra, this isn’t a new money-making wheeze, and none of the RSNO’s players or backroom staff has ever done anything to anger Leeds-based hotties – at least, as far as they know. The problem, says the spokesman, has been caused by “pesky gremlins”.

“We’re virtually under seige,” he continues. See what he did there? “Virtually” under seige? Orchestras might not be able to boast the best IT people, but they certainly seem to attract a higher class of press officer.

Up the isles

THE Year of Scotland’s Islands, the publicly funded programme of cultural events aimed at promoting island living which kicked off last April, will have its grand finale later this month, with a Celtic Connections spin-off event in a Big Top on Skye’s Broadford Airfield. Big hitters scheduled to appear on 23 and 24 March include Roseanne Cash, daughter of Johnny, and Grammy-winning Americana duo The Civil Wars. But there are plenty more Scotland’s Islands events to look forward to before then, notably Fair Isle singer Lise Sinclair’s song project, A Time To Keep, which stops off at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh this evening as part of a tour that will conclude in Reykjavik on Saturday.

Taking the Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown’s eponymous book of short stories as her starting point, Sinclair has written a series of 14 songs that she hopes will “bring the stories out of the book” – not to mention its cast of vividly drawn characters. She’s assembled a great band to perform alongside her, too, including singer and multi-instrumentalist Inge Thomson, guitarist Brian Cromarty, Icelandic musician and composer Ástvaldur Traustasson and fiddler Ewen Thomson.

Don’t worry too much if you can’t make it to the Scottish Storytelling Centre tonight, or, indeed, to Reykjavik on Saturday. If the hypnotic, slightly woozy title track is anything to go by, introduced by the tolling of the Fair Isle Chapel bell and telling the elemental story of a fisherman-crofter whose life ebbs and flows with the seasons, there should be plenty more performances of A Time To Keep to look forward to.