From the stage and before the CSO had played a note he introduced us to two young members of the orchestra who have just achieved exciting, international successes in their careers. He got each to stand up to be showered with our applause.

One day, Milton prophesied, we will see these musicians back here as soloists with the CSO: "And we will have to pay them 100 times more than we pay them at the moment!"

But of course, he chided, you will never read about these sorts of achievements in the newspapers because newspapers only ever get excited by sport.

Had these two youngsters had comparable successes in sport, he accused, (amiably though, for he is a personable maestro), they would be on newspapers' front pages. But as it was they were not in the newspapers at all.

Belatedly, and so as to contradict Maestro Milton and to save this newspaper some blushes, this column reports here and now (albeit not on the front page) that the two musicians introduced to us on Wednesday's are the orchestra's Alexina Hawkins and Rainer Saville.

Ms Hawkins is a viola player and has been invited to join the German Chamber Orchestra.

Rainer Saville from Sydney is the orchestra's principal trumpeter and at a recent prestigious Santa Barbara Music festival he so impressed discerning musical movers and shakers who heard him that he has been awarded a fellowship that early next year will see him having a sojourn with (gasp!) the New York Philharmonic.

Alexina Hawkins spoke to us by phone while she was walking, gambolling, skipping even, at what seemed a gallop (for the wind whistled through the phone as if she was standing in the prow of a Viking ship negotiating a blustery fjord) to Civic from her family's home in Campbell.

She is a Canberra girl, she confirms, but at the moment she is living in Berlin (at the moment just home on holiday) so as to be in the orbit of a special teacher. She is very thrilled to be deepening her connection with the Berlin-based German Chamber Orchestra with which she rejoices she has already had two stimulating "guest gigs".

To be invited to play with them is, she says (if I heard her properly with the wind in the Canberra fiords buffeting her mobile) exciting and fulfilling because "you feel kind of legitimised in what you're doing".

On Wednesday night in the Llewellyn Hall we were left what the tabloids would call "ashen-faced" by the maestro's rebuke. However some colour returned to my cheek in time for the the Sibelius' violin concerto.

The Sibelius was the reason for my being out so late and for willingly enduring the humiliation of having to sit (even though I am a designated ACT Living Treasure) in the Llewellyn Hall's cheapest seats with a ticket paid for from my own piggy bank.

But as we never tire of saying it is a true, broad-shouldered city in which you can go to so fine and refined a symphony concert in the elegant Llewellyn Hall on a Wednesday and then, rubbing shoulders with a very different clientele, to a wild CBR Brave ice hockey match in that ramshackle den of iniquity the Philip Ice Rink the following Saturday.

What riches there are in this city. The man (and woman) who is tired of Canberra is tired of life.

Let's hope that the same sentiment (that to be tired of a fine city is to be tired of life) is also true of the people of today's rebuilt Hiroshima.

Hiroshima has been on all thinking minds lately because of the 70th anniversary of the bombing. Meanwhile this column has run several attention-grabbing items about connections between Hiroshima's ordeal and Canberra.

For example we reported how every year at this time the Hiroshima Acacia Appreciation Society sends the Australian national Botanic Gardens (ANBG) 1000 wattle-yellow ribbons.

This year's consignment arrived last week. Wattles are revered in Hiroshima because after the blast and with no expectation of anything ever growing again in the blasted zone, up popped, from a seed, an Australian wattle (to be precise an Acacia dealbata, the Silver Wattle).

Now the ANBG has found for us an undated picture of some women of Hiroshima actually preparing an assignment of the ribbons to be sent to the Gardens.

The Gardens' Jennifer Salkeld tells us that the first of the 2015 ribbons, having arrived with their usual punctuality, will be distributed to visitors to the Gardens on September 1, Wattle Day. Visitors wear them during their Gardens' visits and are then encouraged to take them home and attach them to a favoured tree.

And what a well-travelled readership you are! So many of you have reported seeing at Hiroshima the fabled Eucalypt that survived the blast.

And several of you saw and were moved by how at the Peace Memorial Park visitors leave bottles of spring water to comfort the souls of those who died from the blistering, searing blast and its aftermaths.