Tag Archives: Edinburgh Festival Chorus

BBC SSO / EIF Chorus / Runnicles

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Fundamental to this awesome Usher Hall performance of Mahler’s Symphony No 2 ‘Resurrection’ was the element of control: utter control, visceral and monumental. And the figure exercising it over a full-blooded Edinburgh Festival Chorus and hyper-receptive BBC SSO was the Edinburgh-born maestro Sir Donald Runnicles, whose track record for such epic occasions goes before him. There’s just something you can read from his physique – the bulk of a tighthead prop combined with the wily intelligence of a playmaker and masterful composure – that translates into electrifying, match-winning euphoria.

That this would be an unforgettable adventure was clear from the outset. From the lower SSO strings, biting rhythms prophesied the epic and volatile journey ahead, melodies caked in mournful heroism emerging from the woodwind, the initial gripping climax becalmed by magically whispered string reflections. The entire movement – the funeral rites of the dead hero – exposed its argument forcefully, Runnicles’ effortless need-to-know gestures gleaning crystalline details that knew their place in the grander scheme of things. 

Then came the charm, firstly with the gentle minuet that opens the second movement, tender and spirited before engaging in more fulsome pursuits, utterly bewitching in its eventual manifestation for pizzicato strings, like serenading mandolins. If the brief timpani wake-up call shocked the life out of one audience member near me, the third movement’s ensuing cheery Ländler, with its intermittent diversions, remained charged with acid humour and effervescent character to the point of its screaming climax and subsequent quiescence. 

Thus the ground was prepared for that melting opening phrase of Urlicht (Primal Light from Mahler’s own Das Knaben Wunderhorn), a moment savoured with bestirred ecstasy by mezzo soprano Karen Cargill. Her voice seemed especially ripe in this short but transformative setting, the engagement multiplied by her memorised performance, setting the scene for an ultimately ecstatic finale.

Here we first encountered the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, also performing off score, and as a result of which projecting with profound distinction. Whether in the muted mystery of their opening utterances (“Rise up”), or the effusive waves of crescendo that culminated in the symphony’s resplendent peroration, this was a chorus, rigorously trained by chorus director James Grossmith, that was sure in its purpose and magnificent in execution, topped by the transcendent finishing touches of solo soprano Jennifer Davis and Cargill.

Most of all, however, this was a BBC SSO in genuinely gripping form. It’s all about the person waving the stick and the chemistry that accompanies the partnership. There was a truly heroic flavour to this performance, superbly and intuitively paced by Runnicles, but above all driven by a charisma that – going by a tumultuous reaction – impacted every soul in a packed Usher Hall.

(Picture credit: BBC/Martin Shields)

Ken Walton

This performance was recorded for later broadcast on BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available on BBC Sounds for 30 days.

EIF: BBC SSO | RSNO

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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

BBC SSO: Verdi Requiem

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City Halls, Glasgow

I’ve no idea what Thursday’s live broadcast performance of Verdi’s Requiem by the BBC SSO and Edinburgh Festival Chorus sounded like over the airwaves – though it’s easy enough to find out by dialling it up on BBC Sounds – but in the flesh, in the limited acoustical sound box that is Glasgow City Halls, and untamed by production tricks, it veered close on its mightiest occasions to deafening. That won’t be the case on Sunday, when the same performers under SSO chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth repeat this showpiece work in the spaciousness of Edinburgh’s Usher Hall.

That said, reservations lay not entirely with bricks and mortar. What Wigglesworth gave us on Thursday evening was a Verdi Requiem rich in golden moments, at times particularly thought-provoking, but which was otherwise erratic in its piecing together of what is essentially fluent impassioned opera dressed in sacred concert hall formality. 

The very opening was full of theatrical promise – the slow, considered cello motif faintly whispered, embracing a brooding, mysterious tone from which the opening Introit and Kyrie looked set to rise and fall with mountainous persuasion before the ensuing Dies Irae, with its savage drums, venomous energy and protracted drama. 

The full-bodied Festival Chorus, trained by its director James Grossmith, was instantly impressive, wholesome and confident, wide ranging in its expressive power, diction crystal clear. Enter, too, the solo vocal quartet, notable initially for the piercing operatic tenor of Antonio Poli, to which soprano Miah Persson, mezzo soprano Alice Coote and bass William Thomas added both their corporate heft and, where it mattered, intuitive sparks of individuality. The SSO responded dutifully with supportive playing and matching sumptuousness, despite the brass being actively encouraged to overwhelm the chorus. 

All this gave Wigglesworth scope to add his own thoughts – glimpses of often ignored orchestral detail he felt needed emphasis, though some were more awkwardly manufactured than naturally emergent; weighted tempi that, when judiciously applied, magically drew breath. What we didn’t always get was a sense of complete organic synergy – the SSO left ever so slightly behind the beat at times – or sufficient seamless vision to give the piece its macro-visceral grip.

The later, shorter movements produced the same peppering of delights: the soloists revelling in the transformational piety of the Offertory; an ecstatic choral Hosanna to round off the Sanctus and Benedictus (despite its exquisitely busy violin countermelody – the icing on the cake – being barely audible); the spiritual awe and intensity of the Lux Aeterna, including a dynamic floor show from the double basses whose synchronous, animated pizzicato resembled an archery display; and then the Libera Me, its gorgeous a cappella “Requiem Aeternam”, Persson soaring ethereally above, like a precious preparatory moment before the work’s exhaustive, final plea for deliverance. 

If this was a performance that occasionally seemed one rehearsal short of complete readiness, Sunday afternoon’s repeat at the Usher Hall should redeem that. And there. of course, the brass can let off steam without causing any offence.

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / Canellakis

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Conductor Karina Canellakis has some big opera projects on both sides of the Atlantic in the coming season, with Janacek’s Makropoulos Case, The Damnation of Faust by Berlioz and Wagner’s Siegfried in the Netherlands where she is based, and Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss at Santa Fe Opera. She may have begun musical life as a violinist, but her conducting career shows an affinity with singers.

That was very evident at the Closing Concert of this year’s Edinburgh Festival, when she was clearly enjoying the performance of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus in the work that brought this year’s classical music programme to a close, Rachmaninov’s The Bells.

It was also the work that concluded the tenure of Aidan Oliver as Chorus Director, as he moves to Glyndebourne and is succeeded by James Grossmith. The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland conducting graduate inherits a choir on very fine form indeed, wonderfully crisp in their opening utterances in the work’s “Sleigh Bells” start and then in lock-step with the orchestra for the climactic third movement.

The soloists – tenor David Butt Philip and then soprano Olga Kulchynska – have relatively smaller roles until the funereal finale when the chorus partners the baritone, Alexander Vinogradov.

If the symphonic arc of The Bells covers nothing less than human existence from cradle to grave, the two works of the first half were more basic in their concerns. The strings of the BBC Scottish gave Canellakis their best work as she shaped the distinctive sound of Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. This trailer for his opera features the famous Tristan chord, but after hanging in the air for much of the piece, it reached a glorious climax at the end.

For the work in between, Scriabin’s Le Poeme de L’Extase, extra horns and trumpets, harps, celesta, organ and even, handily, bells were added. The composer sometimes referred to this 17-minute tone poem as a symphony, but it really has more in common with the Wagner or modernist works to come in the 20th century.

For all Scriabin’s mystical leanings, the wave upon wave of instrumental climaxes and cascading orchestration in the music seemed to suggest activity rather more physical than cerebral. Canellakis and the SSO paced the work beautifully to its orgasmic last bars.

Keith Bruce

EIF: Florian Boesch | Czech Phil

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Queen’s Hall & Usher Hall, Edinburgh

If every Festival needs to reinvent the wheel to justify the event’s continuing existence – and the 75th one has had to embrace some distinctive post-pandemic thinking in particular – the inclusion of the comfortingly familiar is also an important ingredient of its success, especially at the box office.

Almost a decade ago, Austrian baritone Florian Boesch and pianist Malcolm Martineau had a Spring residency in Glasgow performing the three song cycles of Schubert, and in 2016 they performed Die schone Mullerin as part of the EIF’s Queen’s Hall series. Winterreise – the most harrowing of the three – has a performance history at the Festival dating back to 1952, when Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sang it with Gerald Moore in the Freemason’s Hall.

This year we have already heard three of the 24 songs as part of Anne Sofie von Otter’s recital, but Boesch and Martineau are the current gold standard for the cycle. The baritone seems to become the desolate protagonist in his anguished rendering of these songs, taking his listeners on what is – for once accurately deploying a very tired modern cliché – a captivating journey. Martineau is with him every step of the way, pausing or hurrying on as required, sensitive to the most subtle shifts of tone.

Less than half way though, with the last lines of Irrlicht (Will-o’-the wisp) – “Every river will reach the sea; Every sorrow, too, will reach its grave.” – Boesch almost appeared too exhausted to go on. The next song is, of course, Rest.

His voice is a huge instrument, but that power was only occasionally hinted at; instead it was the pianissimo enunciation of the most pained expressions of loss in Wilhelm Muller’s poetry that lingers longest in the mind.

The Czech Philharmonic also has a long and distinguished performance history at the Edinburgh International Festival, as has already been explored in an interview feature on VoxCarnyx. The music they brought this year, fulfilling a booking intended for the 2020 Festival, is also of a piece with concerts in previous years, and the first of them was entirely of Czech music.

Saturday’s began in appropriately celebratory style with Dvorak’s Carnival Overture, as fine a statement of the relationship between Chief Conductor Semyon Bychkov and the musicians as you might wish – huge forces making an immediate impact with precision playing.

The programme ended with Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass, featuring Aidan Oliver’s Edinburgh Festival Chorus, three Czechs and one Russian as soloists and some terrific organ-playing. The organist, Daniela Valtova Kosinova, soprano Evelina Dobraceva and tenor Ales Briscein understandably won the biggest cheers at the end, alongside the choir and the orchestra’s brass. Bychkov shaped a work that is often seen as eccentric with great care, and the impact of both the Credo and the Sanctus was huge.

The conductor’s wife Marielle Labeque and her sister Katia were the soloists on Martinu’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, and they are also no strangers to the Festival. There was vast energy in their playing in the outer movements, but also great tenderness in the Adagio in partnership with the orchestra’s winds. An encore of the fourth movement of Philip Glass’s Concerto for Two Pianos, which they premiered with the LA Phil and Dudamel, was a terrific bonus.

All Festival-goers will be hoping that the next EIF director, Nicola Benedetti, renews the invitations to the Czech Phil, Bychkov and Florian Boesch and Martineau. Is it wrong to hope that the orchestra might be invited to play Prokofiev and the baritone asked to sing Gershwin and Kurt Weill?

Keith Bruce

EIF: Opening Concert

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

In any typical year for the Edinburgh International Festival, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana would hardly be considered a genuine heavyweight opener to the Usher Hall orchestral series. Even for this historic 75th anniversary event, and in its more immediate relevance as the back-to-life adrenalin shot after two years of pandemic suppression, it is a cantata more generally regarded as a populist blast – to some extent the German composer’s one-hit wonder – offering more quick-hit than deep-rooted resonance.

It avoided that pitfall on two counts. This high-octane programme opened with Respighi’s Pines of Rome, affording a psychedelic wonderland of orchestra colouring, moments of seething harmonic adventure, and yes, its own brand of unadulterated thrill. The Orff, itself, had as its messenger the ravishing combination of the BBC SSO, Edinburgh Festival Chorus, NYCOS National Girls Choir and a glorious trio of soloists under Sir Donald Runnicles’ magisterial baton. No absence of emotional impact, then, but justified by its general excellence.

The Pines of Rome – a lustrous sequence of responses to Roman life set against the binding metaphor of the ancient trees that dominate its landscape, and one of the Italian composer’s trilogy of Rome-inspired works – is a stirring creation, its sound world reeking of Mediterranean warmth, historical mystery and sun-filled optimism. 

As such, it was right up Runnicles’ street. He inspired a swashbuckling performance, red hot from the offset, a kaleidoscopic feast that explored every level of aural titillation from quietly succulent to feverishly terrifying. No more so than in the final moments, a seemingly limitless crescendo in which the gradual addition of rearguard offstage brass (spread liberally behind the dress circle audience) and the thundering might of the organ drove the decibel level to delirious heights. 

This was adequate preparation for the primal force that is Carmina Burana. For so many of us, more used to the deliberately modest stage forces preferred in the recent exit-from-Covid months, it was a glorious sensation – the massed vision of the orchestra and choirs made all the more electrifying by the vivid combination of red-shirted NYCOS choir and black-clad adult choir and orchestra.

The singing was just as exhilarating, the wholesome precision of the Festival Chorus offset by the pristine projection of the youngsters, especially in such famously fervent numbers as Tempus est iocundum. Not every moment held perfectly together, with some panic-rushing by the men near the start and moments of under-projection from the women, but the sheer vocal ebullience that spilled out from the stage, and from the resplendent SSO, was mesmerising.

Then there was the tastiest icing on the cake from three perfectly-matched soloists, the soprano Meechot Marrero, tenor Sunnyboy Dladla and baritone Thomas Lehman, whose theatrical antics brought a lascivious edge to what were already riveting musical presentations. Marrero and Lehman hammed up the Cours d’Amours no end, flirting mercilessly in the process. Dladla, too, realised the dramatic potential in his caricature Roasted Swan showpiece.

It was exactly what the doctor ordered, intoxicating escapism to wash away the prevailing gloom and welcome joy, mindless or not, back into our lives. 

Ken Walton

Image: Ryan Buchanan

EIF: Edinburgh Festival Chorus

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Edinburgh Academy Junior School

Henry Purcell, in his wicked moments, had fun with canons. On the face of it, they were innocent trifles, but combine the layers of successive voice entries and hey presto, tawdry language emerged from the wilful collision of syllables and vowels. 

In Aidan Oliver’s delightful final day presentation at the Festival, featuring members of his Edinburgh Festival Chorus and small instrumental ensemble, the air remained pure as he and his musicians breezed their way through a short but engaging canonic journey.

It was as much a journey through time. The opening Sumer is icumen in, rooted in 13th century origins and famous for its rousing presence in cult film The Wicker Man, paved the way for a variety of styles and treatments from 17th century Thomas Ravenscroft (his rousing fusion of Three Country Dances presented simultaneously as a round), to one of 20th century Benjamin Britten’s “Friday Afternoon” songs for children (his somewhat darkened version of Old Abram Brown), to the even more up-to-date sounds of Errollyn Wallen, Richard Crossland and Abbie Betinis.

Wallen’s Rice and Beans – and Plantains Too takes its structural inspiration from the Britten, but otherwise is laced with the eclectic contemporary twists this composer always utilises to energising effect. The title refers to a favourite dish from her birthplace in Belize, and here was a performance that served it up a treat, rhythmically infectious and with smiling countenance. It was also a neat little appendix to Wallen’s opera Dido’s Ghost, one of this year’s earlier Festival successes.

Other contemporary gems on Sunday included Betinis’ plaintive Be like a bird, with its surreal whistled conclusion, Crossland’s whimsical Liverpool Street Station, and Bob Chilcott’s updating of Tallis’ Canon, which takes an old favourite and wraps it in a blanket of melting, thick-set harmonies. 

One of the benefits in hearing the EIF Chorus in miniature is to experience it in a scale of repertoire it would otherwise not have time for. When do Holst’s partsongs ever make it onto an international festival platform? Three of them did so here, exposing their lush sentiment and charm.  

All of this could so easily have seemed like a casual miscellany. But thanks to Oliver’s personable and informative spoken links, the whole came together as seamless, directional and enjoyable. 

And it ended on a familiar note, Pachelbel’s Canon, but with the addition of Thomas Campion’s poem “Come, o come my life’s delight” as a neatly interwoven text, arranged by Oliver himself, and – as has so often been the case in this semi-outdoor Festival – a timely intervention from the outside world. On the words “come then and make thy flight” an outgoing plane roared overhead. Perversely. I’ve quite enjoyed these moments.
Ken Walton