Edinburgh guitarist Sean Shibe’s second album for Pentatone comes within a whisker of being too cool for school. The label describes it as “an ecstatic journey containing music by outsiders, mystics, visionaries, who often have more than one identity”.
Clocking in at 70 minutes, it would be pushing the envelope for a vinyl release, but is formatted that way, with a clear side one/side two split between Oliver Leith’s Pushing my thumb through a plate (originally written for harp) and Meredith Monk’s Nightfall (composed for voices).
The repertoire runs from Monk’s 12th century forebear Hildegard von Bingen to jazzmen Chick Corea and Bill Evans, by way of mavericks Moondog and Julius Eastman. It’s eclectic certainly, but all in the best possible current hipster taste, perfectly designed to appeal to the audience Edinburgh International Festival director Fergus Linehan astutely identified for the strand of “contemporary music” he introduced to the programme.
It’s also electric, Shibe playing two amplified solid-bodied guitars, through an array of effects, most extravagantly deployed on the earliest music. Recorded less than half a mile from the EIF’s Leith Theatre venue in Great Junction Street, it roams the globe and the repertoire, including a world premiere by Daniel Kidane (inspired by lockdown and sitting nicely amidst Corea’s Children’s Songs) and an arrangement of Shiva Feshareki’s 2018 VENUS/ZOHREH (originally for string quartet).
The latter’s graphic score, and the one for Eastman’s Buddha, are reproduced in the booklet of a package that has the guitarist indulging his cos-play enthusiasm. If you are looking for a precedent for the cover art style of Shibe’s recent output, look no further than Icelandic avant-pop pixie Bjork.
All of which suggest a bold level of ambition, and the undeniable fact is that Shibe pulls it off. His playing is immaculate, and the soundscapes he builds flawlessly constructed, never in any danger of straying into prog excess, and beautifully recorded. The disc is also sequenced with great care, so that the more melodious works arrive at exactly the correct time. Admirers of the guitarist’s acoustic classical work will find much to enjoy, as will those fans less likely to take a cottage in Earlsferry to hear Schubert chamber music at the East Neuk Festival each summer.
In record company marketing terms, Lost & Found is probably a “crossover” album, but one that is far too plugged into the zeitgeist and modern taste to deserve the label. It stands a very good chance of knocking some of the more obvious products bearing that label off their perches in the classical charts, but is well worth an attentive listen anyway.
At the end of an Edinburgh Festival during which political issues, from the personal to the international, have been particularly to the fore, an appearance by Californian soprano Angel Blue was most appropriate. In July the singer withdrew from La Traviata at Verona Arena because of the Italian venue’s use of blackface in a parallel summer staging of Aida. Although her public statement was eloquent and reasonable, the social media response explains her absence from those platforms now.
The 75th Festival was blessed to have her on the stage of its largest theatre as special guest of The Philadelphia Orchestra for a free concert that was also streamed live to an outdoor screen in Princes Street Gardens. Her quartet of songs – O Mio Babbino Caro and Vissa d’arte by Puccini, Gershwin’s Summertime and Harold Arlen’s Over the Rainbow – are likely to be the part many of the audience remembers best.
The event was the last of many innovations from Festival Director Fergus Linehan during his tenure, and if it can happen again, it should – the closing fireworks concert enjoyed a good innings, and 70-odd reinventions of the wheel can be regarded as sufficient achievement. There are countless ways in which this free concert format could now be developed.
For this year, the title of the event worked especially well. As Linehan explained in his introduction, it was not just meant to thank the city for welcoming the Festival back after the Covid pandemic, it was specifically a thank-you to those working in the NHS and care-homes, teaching children and delivering food and other essential supplies during the health emergency. We can assume there was an element of personal appreciation from the director to the city as well, and that should be reciprocated – there has been much to celebrate about Linehan’s tenure, and the way the Festival responded to the restrictions of the previous two years was especially admirable.
This concert was an upbeat way to mark all that, and Angel Blue’s contributions were perfect for the occasion. For some obscure technical reason she switched to a hand-held microphone for the Wizard of Oz hit, which did her voice no favours at all inside the venue but possibly made sense in the Gardens, but, that apart, she was in glorious form, on the popular Puccini every bit as much as her Grammy-winning Porgy and Bess.
The ebullient Yannick Nezet-Seguin and his orchestra are also well-suited to a concert of classical pops, able to launch into everything with the appropriate level of energy. We heard the Dvorak Carnival Overture again, and a repeat of the Third Movement of Florence Price’s Symphony No 1, but also Rossini’s Overture to The Thieving Magpie and the Fourth Movement of Beethoven’s 7th, both vibrant masterpieces of orchestral writing, opening and closing the programme.
Just as successful in the context, however, were the two new pieces they played in a concert that was a whistle-stop tour of recent work by the orchestra and its music director. Carlos Simon’s Fate Now Conquers was from a slate of commissions to complement a planned cycle of Beethoven symphonies, and drew on the music of the symphony whose Finale followed, as well as from Beethoven’s journals for its title.
And Valerie Coleman’s Seven O’Clock Shout, which requires the players to cheer as well as play their instruments, could not have been more appropriate. It has become something of an anthem for the orchestra, after being written in 2020 as a sort of concert-hall equivalent of the UK’s clap for carers – a musical appreciation of the huge contribution of, and the sacrifices being made by, essential workers.
There was, of course, an encore after the Beethoven, and if a reappearance by Angel Blue would have suited the packed house perfectly, one of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances was just fine too.
The second Usher Hall appearance by The Philadelphia Orchestra at this year’s Festival includes the First Symphony of rediscovered black American composer Florence Price. At the other side of the Old Town, mezzo-soprano Andrea Baker concluded the Fringe run of a show that celebrates Price’s contemporary Shirley Graham Du Bois, whose opera Tom Tom was premiered the same year (1932) and, although praised, similarly then sunk without trace.
Baker’s show, the latest in her Sing Sister Sing! project and entitled Tales of Transatlantic Freedom, does much more than that, however. Tracing her own lineage to an enslaved great-grandfather (who, like Du Bois, became a very successful student, she at Oberlin, he at Yale), Baker’s operatic training is apparent in her selection from Du Bois’ work, but elsewhere she ranges from gospel and blues to the songs of Robert Burns, her argument being that diversity has always existed in music, it has merely been lost in the present age.
Directed by John Paul McGroarty, the show made best use of a unique Fringe venue, housed within the Old Royal High School, once ear-marked for the Scottish Parliament and now destined to be the new home of St Mary’s Music School. At first prowling around the perimeter of the amphitheatre (which is partly constructed of old pianos) singing field hollers, the mezzo made her case with powerful performances of Ca’ the Yowes and A Slave’s Lament as well as spiritual Steal Away and lascivious dance moves, and some challenging eye-contact with members of the in-the-round audience.
Her essential partner in all this was pianist and arranger Howard Moody, just as versatile as she on two working pianos – “prepared” and otherwise – melodica and assorted percussion (often also the piano). It’s a show sure to have another life.
Cordes en Ciel: Kristiina Watt and Heloise Bernard
A duo of younger female musicians brought a run of lunchtime recitals at the Just Festival in St John’s at the West End of Princes Street to a close earlier on Thursday. Under new manager Miranda Heggie, the music, art and discussion programme concludes with Messiaen’s Quartet for End of Time this evening.
Cordes en Ciel was formed by two international students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Estonian lutenist Kristiina Watt and French/American soprano Heloise Bernard. Specialising in music heard at the courts of Louis XIV in France and Charles I & II in England, they are a charming partnership, and the period of their music nevertheless demanded considerable versatility. From Watt that was a range of accompanying techniques on theorbo and guitar as well as lute, and from Bernard singing in French and English and of emotional love songs as well as wry narrative. The music of Lully and Purcell were understandably to the fore, but we ended in the Franco-Iberian territory popularly explored by Jordi Savall.
The Philadelphia’s first Usher Hall concert, originally to have been Beethoven 9 with the Festival Chorus, began with an unbilled “present” to the Edinburgh audience – as conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin announced it – of Dvorak’s Carnival Overture. Although a problematic addition for the Festival, as the previous “resident” orchestra at this year’s event, the Czech Phil, had begun with the same work a few days previously, it helped shaped Thursday evening’s programme by getting things off with a fast and furious bang.
The first work in the agreed revised programme was Rachmaninov’s less-often-heard Isle of the Dead. Inspired by a black and white print of an already sombre painting, its is nonetheless far from colourless even if many of those colours are dark ones: eight basses, tuba, bass trombone, contrabassoon and bass clarinet. Mostly about huge ensemble sound, tempi and dynamics controlled with a tight rein by Nezet-Seguin, it nevertheless featured some fine solo playing from leader David Kim and first clarinet Ricardo Morales.
The orchestra’s star principal clarinet was also among the prominent voices in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but it was all about the conductor’s shaping of the old warhorse – without reference to any score. Out of the blocks like a whippet, this was a vigorous Five that shifted through the gears of pace and volume, showing The Philadelphia to be a highly responsive machine. Nezet-Seguin took long-ish pauses between the first and second and second and third movements, perhaps to prepare ears for the perfection of the segue from Scherzo to Finale – the make-or-break point of any performance.
Regardless of the bolt-on bonus at the front end of the evening, there was an encore, although we have, of course, heard the poignant Prayer for Ukraine from other orchestras too.
Keith Bruce
Picture of Yannick Nezet-Seguin by Hans van der Woerd
To describe Handel’s oratorio Saul as “an opera in all but name” is also to acknowledge the risk that it is neither one nor the other, and that was true of this concert performance at the Edinburgh Festival. Like the Philharmonia’s Fidelio in the opening week, it might have been enhanced by the involvement of an overseeing directorial eye, placing and moving the musicians.
It is a small thing, but particularly annoying was the seating of the natural trombones – instruments with which the composer was breaking new ground – almost invisibly behind the handsome, and very tall, chamber organ that had been brought on to the platform for the occasion (the hall’s own fine built-in instrument being anachronistically too powerful for the job).
The orchestra here was period band The English Concert, founded by Trevor Pinnock, currently directed by Harry Bicket and conducted here by Dunedin Consort’s John Butt, replacing Bernard Labadie. Scotland is indeed fortunate to have on hand someone not only able to jump in and direct three hours of rare Handel, but guaranteed to do so in a style that finds the natural propulsion of the score and is supremely sensitive to the needs of the singers.
And what a cast of principals we heard! Countertenor Iestyn Davies is as capable of filling the Usher Hall with swelling sustained notes and filigree ornamentation as he has been of holding a Queen’s Hall audience in the palm of his hand. His David was wonderfully matched at the start by Sophie Bevan’s Merab – the finest acting performance from among these singers and in glorious voice. Canadian tenor Andrew Haji and American soprano Liv Redpath were excellent, if slightly less animated, as Jonathan and Michal, and James Gilchrist the perfect choice to double in the ecclesiastical and pagan roles of the High Priest and the Witch of Endor.
The same casting wisdom applies to bass Neal Davies in the title role, who caught exactly the right tone for the vacillating King, allowing us to find a little sympathy for a difficult character.
In what was the only choreographed move of the night, the 26 singers of the English Concert stood up by section before the opening choruses (the “Hallelujah” is near the start of this one), which immediately made apparent how few of them were producing such a rich sound. The choir’s precision dispatch of the complex “Oh fatal consequence of rage” at the end of Act 2 was particularly memorable. Step-outs in the smaller roles were uniformly excellent, and bass William Thomas – credited only in the supertitles at the start – made a huge impression in his Act 3 cameo as the Apparition of Samuel.
As well as those trombones, the period instrument band was full of fascinating colours – this was a work on which Handel really indulged himself. Silas Wollston’s chamber organ had an early showpiece and Masumi Yamamoto supplied the bells of the carillon in Act 1 as well as her harpsichord continuo, while Oliver Wass followed a Iestyn Davies aria with a lovely harp solo played from memory. Among the combinations of instruments Handel deploys, the trio of cello, harp and archlute for Bevan’s “Author of peace” was especially lovely.
If the Act 3 Death March, once a mainstay of state funerals, is best known of the music, the scene that precedes it is Saul at its most operatic, as the King turns his back on his faith to consult the witch. We are in similar territory to Macbeth here – librettist Charles Jennens was a Shakespearean as well as a Bible scholar – and surely paving the way for the confrontation between Don Giovanni and the Commendatore. Those parallels appeared, and sounded, to be in the mind of Neal Davies’s impressive Saul.
Scotland’s own orchestras have been impressive throughout this 75th Edinburgh International Festival, and the trend continued on Tuesday with a thoroughly captivating Mahler’s Third Symphony courtesy of the RSNO, mezzo soprano Linda Watson, women members of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, the RSNO’s own Youth Chorus and the orchestra’s music director (soon also to become music director-elect of the Minnesota Orchestra) Thomas Søndergård.
If that proved an earth-shattering entity in itself, there was an added bonus, the world premiere of Sir James MacMillan’s For Zoe, a brief and eloquent tribute to the former RSNO principal cor anglais player, Zoe Kitson, who died earlier this year at the age of 44. In what must have been a extremely personal moment for the orchestra, MacMillan’s elegy, inevitably driven by a soulful and expansive cor anglais solo played enchantingly by current incumbent Henry Clay and enshrouded in a mist of ethereal whispering strings, served to honour its reflective intention.
It played a magical part, too, in programming our minds for the Mahler to come. In its gentle wake, and after a choreographed silence, Søndergård’s vision of the symphony emerged with persuasive patience and organic potency.
The opening movement is, itself, a monumental challenge, any underlying structural logic offset by the nervy extremes of its restless content, a seemingly incongruous series of frenetic mood swings. Yet, with the extended RSNO in thrilling form, such contradictions were the powerhouse of a thundering, directional triumph. The all-important trombone solo, cutting through the texture like an Alpine horn blasting from the highest peak, was a compelling presence, immaculately played by guest principal Simon Johnson, more normally seen in his home patch with the BBC SSO.
But there wasn’t one weak link in this line-up, its breathtaking commitment and precision furnishing Søndergård with the freedom to input insightful and energising spontaneity, not least in the sparkling allusions to nature in Part Two (the final five movements). Luxuriant ease characterised the wistfulness of the Tempo di Menuetto, like wild flowers wafting in an unpredictable breeze. Then to the “animals” of the friskier Scherzo, its rawer rustic charm offset by momentary bouts of nostalgia.
“O Mensch! Gib Acht” (O man, be careful), warns the mezzo soprano in the shadowier Nietzsche setting in the slow movement. Watson delivered this with weighing restraint, deliciously understated but not without an enriching warmth. As such, the sudden clamour of (real) church bells, the thrilling innocence of the children’s voices and the more cautionary adult chorus that embody the penultimate movement was like a brilliant sun suddenly bursting through a clouded sky.
If this performance began with a monumental philosophical statement, it ended with a truly cathartic one, Mahler’s ultimate, ecstatic expression of “the love of God”. Søndergård shaped this concluding movement with unstoppable conviction, from the soft-glowing, hymn-like sincerity of the opening to the bells-and-whistles euphoria of the final bars. Here, Mahler wallows in excess glitter and sentimentality so OTT you wonder just how much of a Hollywood hit he would have been had he lived later and felt the inclination to sell his soul to the movies. He certainly knew how to write a musical blockbuster.
Max Bruch would surely be dismayed to know how much he is still identified with the first of his three violin concertos (which he sold to a publisher for a pittance), his later Scottish Fantasy its only real rival in the modern repertoire.
Nicola Benedetti plays both, of course, and few regular concertgoers in Scotland will never have heard her perform the concerto during her starry early career. It is a box office favourite, and best known for the Hungarian dance music of the Finale, written for the work’s virtuoso dedicatee Joseph Joachim, who had no small hand in the shaping of the piece.
If you were fortunate enough to be hearing it for the first time at the start of the final week of the 75th Edinburgh International Festival, however, you will have heard another side to the concerto – and one that might have gratified its long-dead composer.
Benedetti, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev put the focus firmly on the central Adagio movement, treating the faster music around it almost as supporting furniture. It was a glorious account of a beautifully structured part of the work that takes its themes through many changes of key, falling figures in the winds playing against climbing ones in the solo line, and lush interplay that owes much to Mendelssohn and to Schubert.
With little more pause before the Finale than there is between the first and second movements, Emelyanychev and Benedetti made a wonderful arc of the whole piece, the violinist allowing neither her cadenza at the end of the Vorspiel nor her first bar of the Allegro energico to disturb the flow.
Of course, the faster showier music was still there, and few play it with more panache than Benedetti, but it was far from the whole story here.
For an encore, Emelyanychev was at the piano for another familiar favourite recorded early on by Benedetti – the Meditation from Thais by Massenet.
After that, Tchaikovsky’s ballet music for The Sleeping Beauty could almost seem an exotic choice, but Emelyanychev chose to play a sequence of music that eloquently told the tale that everyone knows, even if some of the score is much more familiar than other parts.
Guest principal clarinet Yann Ghiro, first trumpet Shaun Harrold, principal cello Philip Higham and harpist Eleanor Hudson all made telling solo contributions, but it was the precision tempi of the ensemble – playing as if in a pit for a performance – that impressed most. The music at the end of Act I built to a sumptuous peak from which the marvel was being able to continue, although the Entr’acte Symphonique of Act 2 matched it.
For the second of its Edinburgh Festival appearances this year, the Czech Philharmonic, under its St Petersburg-born music director Semyon Bychkov, turned its attention to a single, monumental symphonic statement, the gnarled psychological discourse that is Mahler’s Seventh Symphony.
This is the orchestra that once delivered the original premiere in 1908 under Gustav Mahler’s baton. He did so despite concern over its “less than first rate” capabilities. No such worries for Bychkov, whose tight-knit control over the modern Czech Phil on Sunday presented the 80-minute symphony in colourful, manic and ultimately propulsive light.
His eye was firmly set on the endpoint, a triumphant finale still bearing the savage twists that pervaded and unhinged (for the right reasons) the previous four movements, yet through which sufficient dazzling positivity emerged to shake off Mahler’s palpable doubts and demons. This was a cathartic moment, heroic Wagner-like grandiosity mixed with equal measures of Straussian opulence and intimacy, yet the sniper fire of acid modernism constantly threatening to sour that optimism. Here, the orchestra reached blazing heights, the final moments gloriously exuberant and exhaustive.
If the performance lacked anything to that point, it was the potential for greater derring-do. Any risk seemed to be all Mahler’s, orchestral colourings that verge on extreme surrealism, a harmonic battle field that pits minor and major as almost irreconcilable warring factors. Yet, while Bychkov chose to contain much of the wilder moments, his justification came in the controlled, explosive impact of the finale.
Nor did he underplay the most distinguishing features of this work: the dark, disturbing freneticism underpinning the opening movement, the spellbinding virtuosity of the first Nachtmusik (remember the 1980s’ Castrol GTX advert?), the sardonic eccentricity of the central Scherzo, that moment of limpid reverie, the second Nachtmusik, characterised by the mandolin and guitar.
This was never a Mahler 7 that centred its intentions on simply raising the roof. Instead, it was a performance of real substance, relevance, potency and intelligence, offering one of many viewpoints this ambiguous symphony is capable of inspiring.
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?
Conductor Semyon Bychkov and members of the Czech Philharmonic talked to Keith Bruce ahead of their Edinburgh Festival concerts
Between the Philharmonia at its start and the Philadelphia when it ends, the 75th Edinburgh International Festival has another orchestral residency when the Czech Philharmonic plays two concerts under the baton of its Chief conductor and Music Director Semyon Bychkov.
The relationship between the Czech orchestra and the Festival is an important one, with regular visits over the years under many of the great conductors with whom it has been associated. Almost always the concerts have included Czech repertoire by Smetana, Janacek and Dvorak, often alongside the music of Gustav Mahler.
In 1969 the recently-appointed Vaclav Neumann was on the podium, returning in 1983 in partnership with Jiri Belohlavek for a concert featuring the piano duo of Katia and Marielle Labeque. Belohlavek conducted two of the three concerts in 1991, but Janacek’s epic Glagolitic Mass was under the baton of Sir Charles Mackerras. That same team returned at the end of the 1998 festival and in 2000 played two Usher Hall concerts and in the pit at the Playhouse for Jiri Kylian’s Nederlands Dans Theater.
The story actually goes back to the years of the Festival’s founding, when the Czech Phil’s conductor Rafael Kubelik, who had maintained a defiant attitude to the Nazis during the Second World War, decided he could not live under another tyrannical regime following the Communist coup and used the opportunity of conducting a Glyndebourne production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the King’s Theatre in 1948 to defect.
The orchestra will this year play the music of their homeland on Saturday, with the Labeque sisters once again the soloists in a programme that also includes the Glagolitic Mass with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. On Sunday we will hear Mahler’s Symphony No 7, a work the orchestra premiered in Prague in 1908, under the baton of the composer. Conducting both concerts this weekend is their Music Director since 2018, Semyon Bychkov, who is married to Marielle Labeque and a Russian who swiftly and eloquently condemned the invasion of Ukraine at a time when others were equivocal.
In common with many public buildings in Prague, the Czech Phil’s concert hall, the Rudolfinum, displays the colours of the Ukraine flag in solidarity with the people there. This is no distant conflict for the people of the Czech Republic, and the orchestra’s Chief Conductor was an important voice at the start of the war, issuing a statement headlined “Silence in the face of evil becomes its accomplice”.
In April of this year, on the morning after a filled Rudolfinum heard a concert of a contemporary symphony by English composer Julian Anderson, Prague Panoramas, a Mozart Piano Concerto played by Vikingur Olafsson and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Bychkov was happy to talk about both the current situation, his relationship with the land of his birth, and the recent history of an orchestra with which he clearly enjoys a fond relationship.
Resident in France, he was settled into a late freelance career and not minded to seek a contractual post with any orchestra when he was approached by the musicians, following the death of Belohlavek. “I couldn’t refuse 124 orphans,” he says, smiling.
“The pandemic took away many of our plans, including an invitation to Edinburgh in 2020, and also a visit to Moscow to perform there. That was before this tragedy started and now there is no discussion of that, either possible or desired.”
Concerts in the Russian capital would have been a major event for the orchestra and for its Chief Conductor, who was a prize-winning young talent in St Petersburg before leaving for a career in the West.
“I left because I wanted to be free to live the way I wanted to live, free to think the way I want, free to express myself the way I want, and free to make music that is important to me, or not to make it because it is not important to me,” he says, before acknowledging another side to his decision.
“Antisemitism exists everywhere, the difference there was that it was institutionalised within the state. I saw my father suffer from that, before I was given opportunities that were amazing and without precedent. But 50 years later my answer, and my decision, hasn’t changed.”
“A country that refuses to recognise the dark pages of its history and accept the necessity to atone for them will never be able to come out of enslavement to those dark pages. Russia lost 27 million people during World War Two, but more in the gulags of Lenin and Stalin – yet people there are nostalgic for Stalin.”
Semyon Bychkov conducts Czech Phil in Prague’s Rudolfinum
Bychkov conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the 2019 Festival, in a concert that included Mahler 4, and he was on his first big European tour post-pandemic with the Czech orchestra when the Ukrainian invasion happened. It changed the dynamic of the dates, he says, with London’s Barbican and concerts in Berlin and Vienna quickly selling out.
There can be little argument that it is in the company of the orchestras of those cities that the Prague orchestra belongs. Some of the musicians in the Czech Philharmonic are long-served enough to have played under Neumann and under Mackerras in Edinburgh.
Oboist Ivan Sequardt says: “Touring is an essential part of our work. We love the Rudolfinum, but there are halls that are better suited for bigger pieces: Leipzig Gewandhaus, Birmingham Symphony Hall and the halls in Yokohama and Tokyo in Japan. Our home venue has limited space and some compositions need to be played elsewhere.”
Just the same, Sequardt is not entirely delighted to be taking Mahler 7 to the Festival. “Agencies want it because it was premiered here in Prague, which is a shame. It is a great piece up to the last movement, which is too long and full of unnatural and pointless repetitions. Maestro Neumann was right to cross out some of those as a favour to the audience. I like Symphonies 5, 4, and 1 much better.”
The orchestra is getting to know them all again, because it is in the midst of recording the whole cycle for Pentatone, following the success of an acclaimed 7-disc set of the music of Tchaikovsky. Symphony No 4 was released in April and 1, 2, 5 and 9 are already “in the can”.
For Bychkov, Mahler was an obvious choice.
“Mahler is viewed as an Austrian composer because his later years were spent in Vienna, although he was born in this country and his DNA is the DNA of the Czech Phil. During the pandemic, Simon Rattle came to work with the orchestra and described it as ‘the perfect Mahler orchestra’”, he says with pride.
“When I first arrived, the agreement we made was for me to spend 16 weeks of the year with the orchestra, but it has never been less than 20. I am here not because I must but because I want to. Music is existential for the Czech people, as we see in the audience as well as the orchestra.”
“We really appreciate collaboration, and conductors who treat us a partners,” says Sequardt. His colleague Jaroslav Pondelicek from the viola section adds that the orchestra is more flexible than it used to be in its accommodation of the desires of conductors.
“The Czech Phil sound is very tender and transparent,” says Pondelicek, “and Bychkov has added more passion and energy, especially to the strings.”
In the recording studio, he says, the conductor always wants long takes of whole movements but will not hesitate to ask for them again if he is not happy.
“His preparation is fantastic, with great detail. He wants the best result possible and it is great value for us that he will not be satisfied if we play less than our best.”
With a Japanese flautist and a Spanish double bass player, there is evidence of international recruitment within the ranks of the Czech Phil, but it is much less than we are familiar with in the UK.
The players see that as a strength, and so does the conductor.
“All but two are Czech, so there is a continuity in the way the musicians think about phrasing. We want to preserve that because it makes the orchestra unique. And the orchestra is on the young side but very mixed age-wise, which is lucky because it cannot be arranged – it is an natural process of regeneration,” says Bychkov.
70 years old this year, Bychkov has conducted many of the world’s finest orchestras, across North America and Europe and speaks from vast experience.
“If an orchestra is not loved there is nothing you can do about it,” he says. “But this orchestra is loved, first of all by its home audience – and we feel it every time we come onstage by the way they greet us and how they listen – and it is loved elsewhere as well, and that helps. Not everyone has this privilege.”
Czech Philharmonic and Semyon Bychkov are at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on August 20 and 21 as part of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. eif.co.uk
Richard Strauss offhandedly referred to Salome as “a scherzo with a fatal conclusion”, but then he was prone to such deviant moments of glib, self-effacing understatement. As this raw, incisive concert performance by the Bergen Philharmonic under chief conductor Edward Gardner and heady cast, spearheaded by Swedish soprano Malin Byström in the title role, made abundantly clear, Salome remains one of the game-changing operas of the 20th century opera.
With a libretto fashioned around Oscar Wilde’s eponymous play (via Hedwig Lachmann’s German translation), Strauss didn’t hold back in adapting such a gruesomely salaciously plot – scandalised mainly by Salome’s hideous demand to receive and kiss the severed head of Jochanaan – into a thoroughly grotesque, uncompromising and radical piece of music theatre. This un-staged presentation made the strongest of cases for the penetrating emotional clout of the music alone.
Gardner, who relinquishes his Bergen post in 2024 to become artistic director of the Norwegian Opera and Ballet, had the full measure of it. His orchestra’s unceasing role was monumental, displaying passion and precision at every nail-biting turn, the sheer weight and volume at times overwhelming, but never to the detriment of detailed instrumental subtleties that glistened with illuminating intent.
It’s all about Salome, of course, and what a seething performance from Byström, who is set to sing the role next month in a revival of David McVicar’s staged production at Covent Garden. You could sense in her Edinburgh performance a hint of mental preparation for that, every eye movement and body gesture testing the water.
And who’d have thought the Dance of the Seven Veils could have proved so seductive without the actual dance? Byström simply tossed a silken scarlet scarf at Herod’s feet before leaving the stage to allow Strauss’ provocative musical striptease to speak for itself. But the focus was ever on the voice, and a performance of thrilling stature, bestial venom and captivating sexuality.
There was barely a weak link in this entire cast, its core characters evenly distinguished. Gerhard Siegel imbued Herod with a fitting, almost maniacal, sleaziness, countered potently by the superior smugness of Katarina Dalayman’s Herodias and the piety and passion in Johan Reuter’s soaring performance as the fated Jochanaan.
Above all, this was a performance engineered by Gardner that maintained its grip from start to finish, the tension inexorable, the expressive possibilities fully explored. It was Bergen’s second operatic triumph at an Edinburgh Festival. Here’s hoping there’s a third.
The Chineke! Orchestra has made a profound and lasting impression on the classical music world, with its commitment to ethnic diversity among its players and the composers it performs. It’s not a strangulating, exclusive deal – look at the wide multi-cultural spread among its ranks – but it’s a prominent one. Classical music, and society, are all the better for it.
We experienced that in miniature on Thursday, when the Chineke! Chamber Players took to the Queen’s Hall stage for a programme that delved into music by composers much of the audience are unlikely to have heard of – Black Americans William Grant Still (1895-1978) and 52-year-old Valerie Coleman, and contemporary native Australian artists Deborah Cheetham and William Barton – as well as Mendelssohn, his posthumously-published Piano Sextet Op110.
That’s all very well, but at the end of the day if a piece of music is merely fair-to-middling it’s not going to set the heather on fire, and the first half of this concert certainly left this listener unconvinced we’d heard anything particularly exceptional. Many of the performances, a range of ensemble mixes culminating in Barton’s frontline appearance on didgeridoo, struggled to make proverbial silk purses.
Still’s Folk Suite No 1 undoubtedly bears a popular charm, its references to African folk song, Black spiritual and high-spirited Jewish songs very much a starter for ten, with a catchy opening movement simplistically reminiscent of Arthur Jacob’s Jamaican Rumba. Coleman, a more expansive compositional voice in her early 50s, aims to interpret life in the American South through the medium of the classical scherzo, which Red Clay and Mississippi Delta did in a performance that played to its bluesy tenor, got us finger-clicking (though with no indication of when to stop) and a virtuosity that took time to emotionally engage and ultimately fly.
For the remaining Australian portion of the opening half, the mood turned distinctively pictorial, first in the filmic soundscaping that is Cheetham’s Ngarrgooroon – Woven Song. Cheetham – one of the country’s Stolen Generation which saw Aboriginal children forcibly removed for their biological families to live with non-Aboriginals – is a multi-disciplined performer and activist whose compositions encompass her beliefs in “country and connection”. While this one oozes atmosphere and mysticism, it struggles to go places musically.
The same might be said for Barton’s The Rising of Mother Country, which started off so promisingly with the composer entering from the rear and processing through the audience soulfully incanting. Once seated within the ensemble, didgeridoos at the ready (he had two, one exquisitely ornate, the other looking as if it had been through the wars and held together with gaffer tape), his role seemed disappointingly incidental. Was it that the didgeridoo is intrinsically subtler than I thought, or was the amplification inefficient? Either way, what looked like an intensity of expression was hard to actually perceive above the fullness of the surrounding ensemble.
Despite that, the overall effect was at times mesmerising, evocatively nostalgic, if ultimately lacking in shape and directional definition. Barton continued with a further number, a song inspired by his early love of rock (I think he referenced Australian rock band AC/DC) in which he simultaneously sang, played guitar and didgeridoo. He was a natural star in this.
Safe to say that the second half, limited to one substantial work, inspired the now piano and string ensemble to a more palpable and profound belief in what they were playing. This was the Mendelssohn’s Sextet, a work that makes no apologies for its technical demands on the pianist from start to finish, but which explores exhaustive possibilities among the entirety of this rich instrumental grouping.
As a whole, Chineke! delivered an invigorating performance, with gritty, witty interplay and capturing the high drama in music that betrays the composer’s odd flamboyant nod to Weber. It almost hit the skids in the final moments, but ultimately this Mendelssohn gem was the much-needed panacea to a strangely undistinguished first half. True quality wins out.
Ken Walton
Image: Chineke! Chamber Players & Wiliam Barton by Ryan Buchanan
One of Scotland’s main promoters of chamber music once told a sceptical me that singers were a harder sell than instrumentalists. My dubiety was, admittedly, based on the star names that appear in the Edinburgh Festival’s Queen’s Hall series, and the appearance of Swedish mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter certainly produced the first full house the venue has seen this year.
That audience undoubtedly went home happy to judge by the ovation she received after the Schubert encore. That was the only occasion in which all the musicians involved – pianist Christoph Berner and string quartet Quatuor Van Kuijk – performed together, but which required von Otter to recite rather than sing.
It was a somewhat odd conclusion to a brief recital that bracketed a pocket “Shubertiad” with songs by Rufus Wainwright. That combination may have made more sense with originally advertised string quartet Brooklyn Rider, who were apparently unable to travel to Edinburgh and yet are joining the singer in Kilkenny and Copenhagen over the next few days. As it was, the two trios of Wainwrights were accompanied by piano, as were von Otter’s four Schubert songs, interspersed with the four movements of the Death and the Maiden quartet, played by Quatuor Van Kuijk.
Whether the imaginative programming served the material is a matter of taste. Wainwright’s unpublished Trois Valses Anglaises are a fine addition to von Otter’s “pop” repertoire, sitting nicely alongside the Brian Wilson songs she recorded with Elvis Costello some years ago. Employing small slides in pitch, she uses a different tone for these than she employs on “classic” art songs, with some show tune intonation, specifically reminiscent of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George here.
The three Songs for Lulu that followed the Schubert are from Wainwright’s 2010 album and without his own distinctive voice revealed older influences, Sad With What I Have kin to Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely, and Who Are You New York? nodding to Ol’ Blue Eyes’ strutting hymn to The Big Apple.
Von Otter’s diction in German is crisper than her English, truth to tell, as her Schubert songs, Death and the Maiden and three from Winterreise, demonstrated. The hymn-like simplicity of Die Nebensonnen was the most suited to her mezzo, while Der Wegweiser and Einsamkeit cry out darker hues.
The string players sounded particularly fine on the Scherzo and Presto Finale of the Death and the Maiden quartet. Earlier leader Nicolas Van Kuijk and cellist Anthony Kondo had been over-dominant in the group’s balance.
The singer turned stage manager for some of the shepherding of her colleagues in the lunchtime recital just as home-town hero Sir Donald Runnicles adopted that role for the curtain call at the concert performance of Fidelio in the Usher Hall later in the day.
Sir Donald Runnicles conducts this concert performance of Beethoven’s only opera, telling a moving story of a wife’s devotion and the resilience of human nature. Usher Hall, Edinburgh.
Using Sir David Pountney’s added English narration, delivered by Sir Willard White, the luxury cast of soloists included a superb Leonore from Emma Bell, who stepped in to replace Jennifer Davis. Like Gunther Groissbock’s glorious Rocco, she was entirely “off the book”, but that was not true of everyone, with Kim-Lillian Strebel, as Marzelline, turning to the score at one point and Markus Bruck reading the music throughout.
Terrifically well sung by the Philharmonia Voices chorus as well as the principals, and played by the Philharmonia Orchestra in the last appearance of its busy Festival residency, this Fidelio was musically outstanding, and rapturously received for that. Runnicles was in his element.
However, it cannot go down as a classic in the recent history of EIF operas-in-concert. Although some of the cast, notably Groissbock, seemed to be trying to guide things, it lacked some directorial shape, with Willard White poorly placed behind his narrator’s desk and the arias and ensembles delivered in a parade-ground line across the stage. Fidelio is fantastic music, but it needs a bit of help to be drama.
Five years ago Lukas Vondracek was a last minute substitute for Sir Andras Schiff in an SCO concert featuring Dvorak’s rarely-performed Piano Concerto that also had to cope with a last-minute change of conductor.
At this year’s Edinburgh Festival the Czech pianist was called upon to step in at the last moment when German percussionist Martin Grubinger tested positive for Covid. Having the Dvorak under his fingers was remarkable, but having Tan Dun’s Percussion Concerto, The Tears of Nature, in his repertoire was unlikely, so the programme was overhauled so that the first half included The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Dukas and the First Piano Concerto of Franz Liszt.
Much like Rossini’s William Tell and The Lone Ranger, for people of a certain age the Dukas will always mean Mickey Mouse in Disney’s Fantasia, but those folk are getting on a bit now, so perhaps younger ears can enjoy the work’s narrative orchestral colour on its own terms, without the pictures.
Its last-minute inclusion probably explained some mushy rhythmic balance between the sections as the pace of the work built, but the orchestra’s bassoons were on point and first clarinet Timothy Orpen sparkled for the first of many solo moments over the evening.
Orpen was a crucial ingredient in the Liszt as well, and conductor Elim Chan found parallels with the Dukas in the dramatic shaping of the work as its later sequence of movements unfolded. Those mourning the loss of the Tan Dun were often reminded that the piano is a percussion instrument in Vondracek’s powerful playing and together he and Chan constructed a compelling case for a work that is not a common inclusion in concert programmes at present. His addition of a Chopin Nocturne as an encore did rather emphasise its melodic debts, however.
All of this built towards the evening’s planned conclusion with Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra as if always intended. Here the RSNO strings sounded more focussed from the start and Chan’s command of the work’s meticulous structure was masterly. There would be no sense in singling out individual soloists because there were quality performances throughout the orchestra. A superb reading of a masterwork, it deserved a fuller house.
Going by the first few Queen’s Hall morning concerts this year, audience figures can only get better. The two performances – Saturday’s chamber miscellany by players from Festival residents the Philharmonia Orchestra, and Monday’s piano trio fronted by wild-haired pianist Ronald Brautigam – certainly warranted a little more support than they got.
In what was no doubt a pertinent nod to Hans Gál’s role in helping initiate the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947, the Philharmonia Chamber Players began with a string trio by the Edinburgh-based academic and composer who fled his native Vienna after the 1938 Nazi Anschluss. Those who know Gál’s music – heavily rooted in Brahmsian rhetoric, but tinged with hints of wider European progressiveness – will appreciate its fundamental austerity and stinging seriousness.
There was a sense of deference in this performance, which struggled initially to define much character in the opening movement, but which seemed more open and at ease in the wittier Presto and resourceful Theme and Variations. It’s a style of music that requires, but didn’t always get, persistent emotional initiative from the performers.
Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen was the game-changer, especially in this novel (to most of us) version for string septet, a considerable reduction on the standard 23-string version that Strauss opted for in its 1946 premiere. The composer evidently drafted the condensed version early on in the compositional process, but it remained unknown until it was rediscovered in 1990, which encouraged the cellist Rudolf Leopold to prepare a performance edition.
If the obvious effect is to trim the fuller version of its sugared opulence, the leaner instrumentation does not lack the passion and heartache that lies at the core of Strauss’ postwar threnody to German culture. Yes, there is a sharpened focus, but as this performance illustrated, that can be its strength. Led by violinist Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay, the septet harnessed the music’s rapt momentum, distinguished by the pulsating clarity and unceasing interaction of their playing.
The player numbers were maximised for Louise Farrenc’s Nonet in E flat, as important for its 19th century craftsmanship as for its composer, a woman in what was then almost exclusively a man’s world. Farrenc was no shrinking violet, demanding and winning equal pay for women on the staff at the Paris Conservatoire in 1850, well before the BBC and Glasgow City Council faced a similar challenge from its female employees.
Coolish to begin with, this performance blossomed into the peach that this work is, solidly symphonic in structure, yet relaxed in its versatile mix of playfulness, lyrical sweetness and robust argument. Like Schubert’s Octet, the juxtaposition of strings and wind is defining, often the source of wit.
Fast forward to Monday, when pianist Ronald Brautigam exercised his musical eccentricity playing a 19th century Erard piano that was the centrepiece of a piano trio programme he shared with violinist Esther Hoppe and cellist Christian Poltéra. The instrument was the defining feature in music by Fanny Mendelssohn (sister of Felix), Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert.
What did it bring to the performances? Initially a slight awkwardness, admittedly on my part, gradually tuning into the tonal containment of an instrument that soon proved its worth in recalibrating the modern piano trio to a shared dynamic more commensurate to the 19th century origins of the music. Instead of the dominating power exercised by the modern-day Steinway, here was an instrument more modest in volume, more delicately voiced, yet technically capable – as in the finale of Schubert’s Piano Trio No 2 in E flat – of quick repetition on one note.
The Schubert dominated the programme, both in length and substance. It’s not so long since East Neuk Festival-goers will have heard it in Crail with Elisabeth Leonskaja on piano. This was like another piece altogether, Brautigam’s pianism brilliantly versatile, yet possessing a scale and sweetness of tone that allowed Hoppe and Poltéra ample scope to explore the softest nuances in the knowledge their sound would carry over even the busiest of piano textures.
The first half paired the boldness of Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in D minor, from its turbulent opening to the melodic freshness of the inner movements, with the characterful contrasts of Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, its flirtatious Humoreske and the loving expressiveness of the Duett shared by violin and cello among its many highlights.
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.
Retiring EIF director Fergus Linehan has identified residencies as a key ingredient in reducing the carbon footprint of the industry, and the presence of Garsington Opera and the Philharmonia Orchestra in Edinburgh at the start of his last programme is part of that. The suggestion must be that the Buckinghamshire company could become a regular partner of the Festival in the way that Glyndebourne was 75 years ago.
This is a big thing for Garsington as well as Edinburgh, as making work for a big proscenium arch indoor stage is new to them, and it will be hoping that such a showcase may lead to further outings for this production as well as more new work travelling to Scotland. Edinburgh has seen many visually stunning opera productions from European companies (Turin’s Boheme five years ago springs instantly to mind), and the good news is that director Jack Furness and designer Tom Piper’s Rusalka can stand happily in such company.
Regular visits by Garsington might also mean the frequent return of Natalya Romaniw, as the company has nurtured the career of the Swansea soprano, and that would also be no bad thing. She was cheered to the rafters by the opening night audience – acclaim that was matched only by the reception for homecoming conductor Douglas Boyd.
Romaniw is absolutely at the peak of her powers, both vocally and as an actor. Furness and Piper have incorporated aerial artists into the watery world of the spirit and her cohorts, and there is a fair amount of crossover in the onstage action, for Romaniw on her own as well as with the three nymphs, Marlena Devoe, Heather Lowe and Stephanie Wake-Edwards. Often ankle-deep in water, the whole cast seem to revel in the elemental aspects of the staging.
That physicality not only chimed nicely with the Festival’s opening event, MACRO at Murrayfield, and the acrobatics of Australia’s Gravity & Other Myths there, but is part of a trend in contemporary opera production also to be seen in Phelim McDermott’s staging of Glass’s Akhnaten with Gandini Juggling. The aerialists here serve a similar purpose in keeping the stage full of action during the crucial instrumental passages of Dvorak’s score.
Boyd and the Philharmonia are as pivotal to the story-telling as that music unfolds, with its vocabulary of themes tied to the characters. Those three nymphs immediately suggest the Ring’s Rhinemaidens, and the Wagnerian parallels were also obvious in Christine Rice’s characterful Jezibaba and Musa Ngqungwana’s ambiguous, ambivalent Vodnik.
On the human side of the story, Gerald Schneider brings a wealth of experience in the role to the Prince and Sky Ingram, who has played the title role, is a stylish, predatory Foreign Princess. However, for all the individual brilliance – amongst the orchestral soloists in the pit as well as onstage – this Rusalka is ultimately a very fine ensemble creation. The darkest of adult fairytales, as far from Disney’s Little Mermaid as you might imagine, it is full of contemporary resonances 120 years on from its premiere – and they leap quite startlingly from the surtitle text in this Czech language production.
Keith Bruce
Further performances on Monday and Tuesday. eif.co.uk
Douglas Boyd makes a rare return to his native Scotland conducting Garsington Opera’s Rusalka at the Edinburgh International Festival. He talks to KEN WALTON
Since turning exclusively to conducting 16 years ago, the former oboist, Glasgow-born Douglas Boyd, has forged a solid reputation among fellow musicians as an out-and-out enthusiast. They warm to his lack of airs and graces, no doubt informed by his first-hand understanding of how orchestral players respond and operate. His own playing career took the now 63-year-old from principal oboe and founding member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe to recitalist in such auspicious venues as New York’s Carnegie Hall.
When he eventually laid down the double reed in favour of a single baton, he had already successfully tested the water as music director of Manchester Camerata. He has since held leading conducting positions with the Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur, the Paris Chamber Orchestra, and in the US the St Paul Chamber Orchestra and Colorado Symphony Orchestra.
But it’s in his capacity as artistic director of Garsington Opera, a post he has held for the last ten years, that Boyd will star in the opening few days of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. On Saturday, the Buckingham-based company brings its recent new production of Dvorak’s fairy-tale opera Rusalka to the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, where it plays – with the Philharmonia Orchestra in the pit, Welsh soprano Natalya Romaniw in the title role, and circus artists adding to the spectacle – for three performances.
Boyd is delighted to be returning to Scotland. “It means a lot to be back,” he says. “I hardly ever perform there, but have been recently, working with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra during the pandemic and more recently doing an utterly inspiring project with junior students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.”
Already, this new Rusalka has attracted rosy comment. Reviewers of last month’s Garsington opening were intrigued by the action-packed staging directed by Jack Furness – who next week will escape Edinburgh to launch his new outdoor production of Bernstein’s Candide in Glasgow for Scottish Opera – and who were especially won over by Boyd’s luxurious realisation of one of Dvorak’s most impressive operatic scores.
“I think it’s one of the great fin de siècle masterpieces,” claims the conductor. “I feel I’m conducting the best music that’s ever been written. We tend to focus on one single aria, the Song to the Moon, but in the broader sense it’s the way Dvorak paints this fantastic text, not only in the vocal line, but throughout the orchestral score. It’s all very Wagnerian, he adds, “where every emotion and symbol is painted in sound.”
Natalya Romaniw in Garsington Opera’s Rusalka
While it’s a fairy tale, it’s very much the adult variety, he argues. “You have to remember that the concept of fairly tales nowadays has been so Disneyfied and made into a children’s genre, whereas if you go back to the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen, it’s actually about our deepest fears as people, which starts in childhood and continues through adulthood. Grimms’ tales can be really horrific and scary; there’s an element of that in Rusalka as well.”
Indeed so. Dvorak’s librettist Jaroslav Kvapil fashioned Rusalka on Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Rusalka, a water nymph, wishes to become a human in order to capture the love of a Prince. The witch, Jezibaba, obliges, but with conditions: Rusalka must remain mute and the Prince must remain true to her. A Foreign Princess plots against them, the Prince rejects Rusalka, then repents. But the curse holds and a desperate kiss leads to the Prince’s death. Rusalka disappears into the watery depths.
It’s possible, says Boyd, to sense that foreboding in the orchestral score well before tragedy reveals its hand on stage. “As in Wagner, there are leitmotifs for each character, like the Rusalka theme at the beginning which is so incredibly beautiful, but when it comes back at the very end of Act 3, it does so as a funeral march. The truth is it’s been a funeral march the whole time, but it takes you until then to finally make that realisation.”
The story in this production is expressed in the original Czech, which Boyd and Furness both see as essential in reflecting the perfect symbiosis of Kvapil’s text and Dvorak’s music. “As long as you’ve got the supertitles in front of you, you get the best of both words. With a good translation you’re not excluding the audience, you’re embracing them, bringing them in. However, the stresses of the Czech language are so intrinsic to Dvorak’s music. The danger sometimes of singing it in English is it can get quite eggy, like trying to fit a square into a circle.”
But there’s always plenty to feast the eyes on in a production that aims to highlight the opera’s to-ing and fro-ing between the world of nymphs and the human world. “We’ve got aerialists [drilled by circus choreographer Lina Johansson] and pretty spectacular things going on on stage which is actually true to this halfway house,” says Boyd. Their presence has also enabled the production to fill Dvorak’s extended orchestral passages with additional representational movement.
For Boyd, the experience has cemented his view that Dvorak’s legacy as as opera composer has been unjustly underappreciated. “I think we tend to fixate on his instrumental output, on the last couple of symphonies, the chamber music, the Cello Concerto,” he argues. “But I think Rusalka is the product of a composer absolutely at the peak of his powers.”
The foundation stones are still firmly in place, but following its celebration of 25 years in the business of quality music-making, Dunedin Consort announces a 2022/23 season that sees it introducing new faces and welcoming familiar ones in new roles, forging new partnerships, and taking up residence in a New Town forty-odd miles from the one in Scotland’s capital.
Those building blocks first, which begin with an Edinburgh Festival concert in the Queen’s Hall, directed by John Butt and featuring the voice of Associate Director Nicholas Mulroy. The tenor will be in charge of the choral tour next May, which is a programme of Marian music, early and modern, that visits Aberdeen, Perth, Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Butt also directs the group’s December Messiah performances in Glasgow, Lanark and Edinburgh, and an Easter outing for Bach’s Matthew Passion in Edinburgh and Glasgow with Andrew Tortise the Evangelist and Neal Davies as Christus. Wigmore Hall concerts of music for Christmas and New Year are also under the baton of the Artistic Director.
Of the new directions, a three-year partnership with the RSNO has already been revealed. It begins in October with Elim Chan conducting side-by-side concerts in Edinburgh and Glasgow that bracket soloist Jorg Widmann’s concerto Echo-Fragment with Haydn and Beethoven.
There’s more Haydn in February when Peter Whelan directs concerts of three early symphonies and CPE Bach’s Cello Concerto in A, with Jonathan Manson as soloist. Performances in Perth, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Benjamin Bayl is guest director for an all-Handel programme in March with Nardus Williams the soprano soloist, and in June the solo female voice is featured again in what are thought to be the first ever UK performances of the cantatas of seventeenth century composer Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre.
With its continuing Bridging the Gap initiative providing a step on to the career ladder for young singers, Dunedin is now joining forces B’Rock Orchestra and Concerto Copenhagen to offer similar mentoring for instrumentalists in a new scheme entitled Intrada. The ensemble’s other outreach initiatives are joined by a new partnership at Cumbernauld’s Theatre’s new home, Lanternhouse, with family concerts, cinema screenings, open rehearsals and events for children all on the bill.
After the Edinburgh Festival, the season opens with Dunedin’s biggest venture of the year, performing Mozart’s C Minor Mass in a new completion by Clemens Kemme at Lammermuir Festival, in Perth Concert Hall and in Saffron Walden, as well as recording the work for a Linn label release. John Butt directs and Lucy Crowe, Anna Dennis, Benjamin Hulett and Robert Davies are the soloists.
Fergus Linehan talks to Keith Bruce as he launches the programme for his final Edinburgh International Festival.
When he stood to unveil the line-up for the 75th edition of the Edinburgh International Festival to Scotland’s arts journalists, director Fergus Linehan revealed his personal delight in being able to introduce a full-scale live public event for the first time in three years when he spoke for the whole industry.
Edinburgh, he said, was “the mothership of festivals – and that gathering is something that our whole industry has really missed.”
“While we are obviously concerned about the actual shows that we are putting on, the assembly that takes place every August is incredibly important for an industry that has been through something really difficult.”
“All the signs are that everyone is coming back this August. It will be a big moment for cultural life, not just for Edinburgh but for the whole of performing arts.”
Linehan has made “Welcome” – usually in friendly black capitals on a yellow background – the one-word slogan of Edinburgh. This year, it is both “Welcome back” and “Farewell” from the Irish director, after eight years in post, the last few dealing with the challenges of the health emergency.
He has taken the Festival into areas – particularly popular and alternative experimental music – that it had not visited before, and his legacy will take time to come into focus, but how does he see his own contribution to the EIF’s development as he hands over the reins to his successor, Nicola Benedetti?
He begins by saying he concurs with his predecessor, Sir Jonathan Mills, that Edinburgh “is good at picking Festival Directors for its time.”
“The Edinburgh Festival doesn’t move in fits and starts but it does change, and the question is how do you loosen the Festival and allow it some flexibility – because we are in a slightly more informal world – while maintaining the rigour.
“I think we have managed that. Some people might say: ‘You’ve loosened it too much’, but I like to think that the person coming after has a bit more flexibility to do what they will – and I hope that Nicky feels that.
“After the last two years, most of the team is still in place and we are able to come out with a full programme. What we did last year was limited compared to a normal year, but I am really proud that we did manage it at a time when it was still touch-and-go whether you could do anything.”
It has also meant that Linehan departs with the Festival in respectable financial shape.
“We raised a lot of money over the period of the pandemic so that we could do last year with tiny audience capacities. And we weren’t doing fully-stage opera and theatre, and we weren’t flying in many people to the city, so there were savings. For now the Festival is in reasonable condition; we are not carrying any deficit.”
From Benedetti’s point of view, what Linehan believes about the core concern of the Festival is probably crucial.
“Music is at the very heart of the Festival and you expand out into other genres in a meaningful way. It is not a theatre or a dance festival, and that is important in the balance with Edinburgh’s other festivals. The Traverse will always have significant theatre offerings. The music at the International Festival is sort of non-negotiable.
“But beyond that, there is maybe more flex than I realise, and looking back I now see there’s more flex than I thought. One of the great things about our supporters is that they are not prescriptive, whether its donors or Creative Scotland, it is not a completely blank sheet of paper, but it is never ‘you must do these 10 things.’ There are strategic goals we have to meet, but there is great flexibility.”
Although he says no-one believes him, Linehan is adamant that he has no new job lined-up, despite lots of offers.
“We are moving to Australia, for purely personal reasons because my wife’s family is there, but I have no masterplan.”
That’s because, he insists, he is unconvinced that jobs like the one he is vacating are the way forward for the arts.
“I am not tired, but I do want to have a look around and get a sense of the way things are going to be. There are obviously these big environmental, sustainability questions, and questions about what leadership in the arts should look like, and the future of the producer/director polymath who tells everyone what to do!”
He laughs, but he is making a serious point. “I am not sure that jumping in as the director of a big company with hundreds of employees is what I want to do right now, because I think things are shifting. People will always need support and there is always work to be done, but maybe it is going to be constituted in a different way in terms of leadership.
“It is an interesting time to get a sense of what way the wind is blowing generally. There have been huge changes in terms of the arts, and in particular the subsidised arts, and where they are going.”
And he thinks he owes that recalibration to his family as well.
“On a personal level, this job is all-consuming and a little bit more 50/50 with my wife is sensible. In 2019, I was away from home about 50 times, so that’s every week. I am not saying ‘poor me’, it was amazing to do all that, but there is a personal balancing up that’s important.
“And I have got a lot of the summer to think about it – because I don’t need to be working on the 2023 Festival!”
The Edinburgh International Festival runs from August 5 – 28. General booking opens on April 8.
It may be couched in terms of sustainability, and the avoidance of needless consumption of resources in the pursuit of artistic excellence from around the world, but the programme for the 75th Edinburgh International Festival also looks back to the shape of the event in the years after the Second World War with its residencies by companies and orchestras bringing more than one programme of work.
That the founding director of the Festival, Rudolph Bing, was a refugee from conflict is also marked in the programme – a thematic strand that has proved more appropriate than the EIF team could have foreseen as they shaped the anniversary event.
The orchestras “in residence” are the Philadelphia, with conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin, and the Philharmonia, under the baton of new Principal Conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali and Sir Donald Runnicles, making his debut with them. The Czech Philharmonic also has two Usher Hall concerts with Semyon Bychkov, as do Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic, one of them a concert performance of Strauss’s Salome with soprano Malin Bystrom.
The BBC SSO gives the Opening Concert, with Runnicles on the podium and the Festival Chorus singing Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, and the RSNO gives the closing one, Sir Andrew Davies conducting the Chorus in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. The RSNO also appears under the baton of Elim Chan to play Bartok and Tan Dun and with Thomas Sondergard to perform Mahler 3 with the RSNO Junior Chorus and the Festival Chorus.
The Chorus’s busy August also includes Janacek Glagolitic Mass with the Czech Phil and Beethoven 9 with the Philadelphia, while the National Youth Choir of Scotland sings in the opening and closing Usher Hall concerts as well as at the 2022 Festival’s free opening event at Murrayfield Stadium, which is expected to attract an audience of up to 20,000.
The Philadelphia’s residency also includes a free 75th anniversary concert at the end of the Festival, details of which have yet to be announced, as well as a further Usher Hall concert including Szymanowski and Florence Price, and Mozart chamber music at the Queen’s Hall, featuring Nezet-Seguin at the piano.
Douglas Boyd conducts the Philharmonia in the Festival’s only fully-staged opera, a Garsington production of Dvorak’s Rusalka by Jack Furness with Natalya Romaniw in the title role, and Runnicles conducts a concert performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio. In a further nod towards the Festival’s origins, its chamber music programme at the Queen’s Hall includes a String Trio by Hans Gals, another refugee who made his home in the Scottish capital and was a founding figure of the event.
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has two concerts, one with Nicola Benedetti, the EIF’s recently-announced artistic director designate, performing Bruch, and playing Gershwin, Bernstein and Copland under the direction of pianist Wayne Marshall, the musical director of last year’s A Grand Night for Singing.
The Usher Hall programme is completed by appearances from Les Siecles and Francois-Xavier Roth, featuring music from 1913 by Lili Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky, Hesperion XXI and Jordi Savall with music from the 14th century, the LSO, Sir Simon Rattle and a Daniel Kidane premiere, Zubin Mehta conducting the Australian World Orchestra, Bernard Labadie directing Handel’s Saul with Iestyn Davies and The English Consort, and the Festival debut of the Helsinki Philharmonic, conducted by Susanna Malkki.
The Festival’s return to the Queen’s Hall after the pandemic includes Brett Dean playing with the Hebrides Ensemble, pianist Malcolm Martineau with Florian Boesch for Winterreise and with Steven Osborne and a quartet of voices, soprano Golda Schultz, mezzos Magdalena Kozena and Anne Sofie von Otter, Richard Egarr, Dunedin Consort, Ronald Brautigam and the Takacs and Pavel Haas Quartets.
The Edinburgh International Festival runs from August 5 – 28. General booking opens on April 8.
