VoxCarnyx

Usher Hall/Broomhouse Hub, Edinburgh

RESIDENCIES by orchestras (and opera and theatre companies) are nothing new at the Edinburgh International Festival, but they had become rarer than in the event’s earliest years because of the speed, convenience and lower cost of international travel.

Environmental concerns and accountability for carbon footprints brought the residency back to the top of the agenda, and that process was accelerated by the rethink necessary during the years of the Covid pandemic.

This year’s Festival music programme was built around a series of residencies and ended with the most varied of them all when the London’s Philharmonia arrived for a four-concert sequence at the Usher Hall and a Virtual Reality outreach project that took their work to a housing estate in Broomhouse.

That last ingredient, which also involved the Festival’s artistic director Nicola Benedetti as violin soloist, is another step on the path of sustainable musical practice that recent events and thinking are bringing about.

The technology that was installed at the Space@Broomhouse Hub during the last week of EIF 2024 is nothing new to the Philharmonia, which has been working with Virtual Reality for a decade. Some of their earlier VR films can be seen in old-fashioned 2D on the orchestra’s YouTube channel, but that cannot compare with the experience of hearing and seeing Benedetti and the Philharmonia play The Lark Ascending via a VR headset.

Recorded at Battersea Arts Centre, with the musicians, under the leadership and direction of Benjamin Marquise Gilmour, playing in-the-round, the film and soundtrack places the viewer in their midst, with 360-degree vision of the performance. It is genuinely immersive, to correctly employ a term much abused at this year’s Festival Fringe.

The perspective of the view changes during the performance, specifically geared to the role of the violin soloist during the work’s 20 minutes, but throughout a turn of the head allows the viewer to look instead at the wind players or sections of the strings. Not only is every detail of the instrumentalists’ skills visible up-close, but their interpretation of the score is minutely appreciable. Beautifully lit and perfectly recorded, this is cutting-edge technology in the service of access to artistic excellence. Parties of schoolchildren and the elderly citizens of Broomhouse were equally wowed by the experience.

In the Usher Hall, the Philharmonia’s live appearance began and ended with captivating performances of a more conventional sort. Not that conventional, however, in the case of the National Youth Choir of Scotland’s contribution to Julia Wolfe’s Fire in my Mouth.

Christopher Bell’s young singers have surely done the Bang on a Can composer a great service in showing that her moving work about the New York garment factory blaze that claimed 146 lives at the start of the 20th century can be sung and acted by non-professionals. With the Philharmonia’s Principal Guest Conductor Marin Alsop on the podium, this was a superb UK premiere of a brilliant contemporary piece, and a repetition for the orchestra’s home audience in London would be the least it deserves.

The young women of NYCOS not only dealt with the tricky rhythmic demands of the score, singing in Yiddish and Italian as well as English, but had learned a wealth of fully-costumed movement, with props, that filled the stage and stalls during a few days of rehearsal. With highly effective film content part of this project too, and the Philharmonia (with guests including the BBC SSO’s Scott Dickinson leading the violas and RSNO principal cor anglais Henry Clay) on magnificent form, it was an unforgettable concert.

The star of the Festival’s Closing Concert, where  the Philharmonia was conducted by Alexander Soddy, was soprano Malin Bystrom as the Countess in Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. She led a quality cast that included Dame Sarah Connolly as Clairon and featured a last minute jump-in by Emma Morwood as the Italian Singer, completing a trio of sparkling female voices.

The most animated of the men were tenor Sebastian Kohlhepp, in fine voice as composer Flamand, and baritone Bo Skovhus as the Count, but the stage was all Bystrom’s at the end. She was off-the-book for the final scene, lifting a concert performance that suffered a little from the limitations such events have.

That was none of Soddy’s doing, however. The conductor had the unenviable task of steering an event conceived as a showcase for Sir Andrew Davis, who died shortly after this year’s International Festival programme was announced. If Bystrom was the star, it was his expert guidance of singers and instrumentalists through the score that made the most of the lovely music.

Keith Bruce

Pic of Malin Bystrom, Dame Sarah Connolly and Bo Skovhus by Andrew Perry