Usher Hall, Edinburgh
Mendelssohn’s Elijah was an odd choice to end the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival and the 60th birthday season of the Festival Chorus. As a programme note online by Professor Eric Levi pithily explained, it is a work that has been as much lambasted as acclaimed, for musical as well as political reasons, since its Birmingham premiere in the mid-19th century, although the Victorians – and the Queen and her husband in particular – generally liked it.
And although performances are not that common in our time, it had been given a memorable one in the Usher Hall just over a year previously when it closed the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary celebrations.
This one was on a larger scale, both vocally and instrumentally, but that meant that there were larger forces to manage, and the benefit was dubious, especially as it has been this choir’s skill in singing quietly with intensity that has impressed this year.
There is a lot of choral content in the structure of the work, but it is in two different voices (narrative and of “The People”), which is only one of the difficulties in story-line which follows the prophet’s life-story chronologically (Baal in Part 1, Jezebel after the interval) but uses texts from across the Old Testament and some of Matthew’s Gospel as well.
The soloists were the stars, Christopher Maltman magnificent in the title role, mezzo Karen Cargill adding a more dramatic performance than soprano Mari Eriksmoen and tenor Ben Bliss in powerful voice as Obadiah. Martha Johnson delivered The Youth authoritatively but the four Rising Stars singers took a moment to settle into an ensemble for their first quartet.
While there were some fine solo voices in the orchestra too, and the brass and horns were on dependable form, this wasn’t a classic performance from the RSNO, great at the choral climax of the work but with a few dips in coherence along the way.
The Festival Chorus had a much finer showcase three days previously with the rather briefer Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein, and the team with whom they had closed the 2023 Festival, conductor Karina Canellakis and the BBC SSO.
That they had to sing in Hebrew rather the English mattered little, the choir dealing with the music’s challenging rhythms with aplomb. Countertenor soloist Hugh Cutting, with his part memorised, was just as commanding as Maltman would be, and first cello Rudi De Groote took his solo as beautifully as RSNO principal Pei-Jee Ng did in the Mendelssohn.
Sadly, the EIF’s Rising Stars were disadvantaged here too, the (different) SATB quartet located next the orchestral percussion between choir and instrumentalists and initially barely audible.
With the choral feature bracketed by Messiaen and Stravinsky, the concert was also a great opportunity for the SSO. In Les Offrandes oubliees we heard string playing just as quiet and demanding of attention as the smaller numbers of Poland’s NFM Leopoldinum had demonstrated ten days earlier, and Petrushka was a delight from start to finish. Canellakis was absolutely on it for the frantic moments of the score, but equally happy to give soloists enough leeway to make the theatrical musical jokes as rewarding as really good players can tell them.
Keith Bruce
Picture by Jess Shurte