Tag Archives: Edinburgh International Festival

Scottish Opera’s new season

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General Director Alex Reedijk is 20 years in the post as he launches Scottish Opera’s new season. He looks forward and back with Keith Bruce.

As Scottish Opera launches the programme for its 2026/27 season, there are a number of anniversaries to be acknowledged. In descending order of antiquity, they include the 200th anniversary of the death of Beethoven, the centenary of the birth of the company’s founder Sir Alexander Gibson, the 50th anniversary of the death of Benjamin Britten, the 30th anniversary of the first Scottish Opera production by Glasgow’s internationally-renowned opera director Sir David McVicar, and the 20th season of General Director Alex Reedijk.

During a long chat in his office at ScotOp HQ, Reedijk was persuaded to look at the path that brought him to that milestone, but was careful to ensure that the others were all celebrated along the way.

To begin with the season, the headline is that it contains six new productions, which is an impressive figure in comparison with recent years, and that has been achieved with clever husbanding of resources.

As already announced, it begins at the Edinburgh International Festival with Missy Mazzoli’s The Galloping Cure, reuniting the team behind the global hit Breaking the Waves.

“It is already booked to go on to Sweden, San Francisco, Canadian Opera and Adelaide,” Reedijk reveals. “It is a piece that needs to be told, and it speaks to our international standing. Missy Mazzoli is in my view the most important female opera composer in the world today, certainly in the English language.”

Co-commissioned by many of those other companies, and working again with Opera Ventures and the EIF, Reedijk is clear that only that range of partnerships make the budget the piece requires attainable.

The company will also be at the Lammermuir Festival in September as usual, a one-off programme in St Mary’s Kirk, Haddington including Britten’s Les illuminations, Phaedre, and Our Hunting Fathers.

Sir David McVicar’s Scottish Opera career began in 1996 with Mozart’s Idomeneo, and he follows up the hugely successful production of Puccini’s Il trittico with the same composer’s final masterpiece, Turandot, premiered a century ago.

The new staging, with Trine Bastrup Moller in the title role, Victor Starsky as Calaf and Hye-Youn Lee as Liu, has the same creative team as Il trittico and will use the original “Alfano One” completion, with its redemptive extra closing scene.

There are many links to other recent Scottish Opera triumphs in the company’s return to the operas of Handel in February. Alcina will be directed by Olivia Fuchs, who was responsible for last year’s acclaimed The Makropulos Affair, designed by Yannis Thavoris, who created the fine set for Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London in 2024, and lit by Jack Wiltshire, last with the company in the same year’s Albert Herring. With Dmitri Jurowski conducting, the cast includes a company debut from soprano Madeline Boreham in the title role.

The same month, and the same set and lighting, adapted by Thavoris and Wiltshire, will see performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh of Fidelio as Scottish Opera’s contribution to the Beethoven 200 season which also features Scotland’s orchestras. Directed by Ruth Knight and conducted by Kensho Watanabe, it will feature Julia Sporsen as Leonore and Thorbjorn Gulbrandsoy as Florestan.

McVicar’s new Turandot is co-produced with Irish National Opera and will go to Dublin in 2027, and Daisy Evans’ new staging of Madama Butterfly, which was seen there last year, is also a co-production and comes to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness and Aberdeen in May and June next year.

Evans’ work includes Scottish Opera’s Albert Herring and the pandemic-era filmed version of Menotti’s The Telephone as well as the 2023 Edinburgh Festival success, Bluebeard’s Castle. Presenting Butterfly’s familiar plot as the recollections of Kate Pinkerton, her reading of Puccini has been highly praised.

Her design partner Kat Heath also creates the set for a new Cosi fan tutte in Glasgow and Edinburgh that will be cast from the students of the new Advanced Artist Diploma in Opera at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. A partnership between Scottish Opera and the RCS, it will sit alongside the Conservatoire’s Masters degree at the Alexander Gibson Opera School and, in Reedijk’s words, “prepare young singers for the world of work.” The Dunedin Consort’s artistic director John Butt will conduct Rebecca Meltzer’s production.

The next step for some of those young people may be as Emerging Artists with Scottish Opera, and their work always includes an extensive tour to halls and community venues in every corner of Scotland. Once Opera-Go-Round, more recently Opera Highlights, and now Opera On Your Doorstep, it undergoes a radical revision this year with a condensed version of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel hitting the road in Autumn and Spring for 34 performances.

Reedijk sees it as an important development “in the spirit of evolution.”

“I don’t know if the step away from programmes of arias is forever, but it is time for a change. Hansel and Gretel is a good title for a small scale tour, sung in English with piano accompaniment, and an opportunity to have five singers instead of four and a locally-recruited children’s chorus.

As we had already moved from arias to scenes from operas, it is good to go all the way to a full show, within our means.”

As well as the Diploma initiative with singers at the Conservatoire, the opera company is also working with other institutions of further education, including City of Glasgow College, on skills-building in other areas of the creative arts that go into producing opera. Reedijk points out that the company’s head of costume started her career as a costume trainee alongside a cohort of Emerging Artists.

That appreciation of what goes on behind the performances is unsurprising because the man celebrating his 20th season in charge of Scottish Opera began his career as a stage technician.

“I came to the UK in 1984, on the back of working in theatre and opera in New Zealand. My first job was as a stage hand at Richmond Theatre and from there I went to the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). That led to a summer job as head of technical at Assembly Theatre in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1988 and an early introduction to Scottish Opera, because I needed a replica painting for a Fringe show and was put in touch with Kelvin Guy, head of scenic art at Scottish Opera.”

Reedijk’s work then travelled a circuit that became familiar to many working in the arts at the time. William Burdett-Coutts, who ran Assembly at the Edinburgh Fringe was also in charge of Glasgow’s Mayfest, where Reedijk became technical boss, with the same job at Wexford Opera in Ireland falling between the two in the calendar.

Return visits to New Zealand for the biennial pan-arts festival in Wellington led to working on converting a concert hall for opera productions there.

“New Zealand Opera had gone bust and the festival became the only home for opera in New Zealand, initially importing productions from Australia and then creating their own shows, the second of which was David McVicar’s Fidelio, in 1998.”

When NZ Opera was reconstituted, Reedijk was asked to run the company and he remained there until 2006 when the invitation to come to Scottish Opera arrived.

“When I started in February 2006 I never expected to be here as long, but it is a great place: big enough to do major works and small enough to be flexible and recognise that not everything has to be on a three-year cycle.”

Particularly since the arrival of Stuart Stratford as Music Director, whose previous experience also included a lot of work outside of conventional opera houses, Reedijk has overseen a company that has been open to new experiences and experimentation. That approach came into its own during the Covid pandemic when Scottish Opera was leagues ahead in terms of its response to the health emergency.

Reedijk says: “Opera is a very adaptable, robust art form and you can make it work elsewhere than the main stages. My festival technical background gave me the confidence to look at a problem like the pandemic and go for possible solutions.

“Sometimes people travel under the assumption that opera can only be done in a temple of art, but my view is that it is robust enough to be done anywhere. Storytelling through music and theatre is strong enough to be adaptable to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.

“And the company stepped up to the challenge, during what were anxious and frightening times.”

Reedijk’s era has also seen a turn-around from Scottish Opera’s regular trips to the government with the begging bowl, as another whopping deficit threatened the company’s survival.

“Financially, my commitment when I started was that we would move from a position of entitlement to one taking responsibility for ourselves. We are charged to make the best of our circumstances and while those are challenging, it was ever thus. We have to use the resources we have available to make amazing work, and live within our means.

“My job is to hang on the legacy of what Alex Gibson set up for Scotland. It’s hard to start something, very difficult to run it, and dead easy to close it. I’m not having that happen on my watch.”

And how long has that watch to run now? As well as clocking up 20 years, Reedijk has also turned 65.

“Stuart and I have a couple of titles we want to get over the line before the close of the decade. Essential works that the company either hasn’t done in a while or not done at all.

“But I do ask myself if it is time to get out the way. Should I open the door for someone else to come in and set a different vision for the company? There are just a few more things I want to see through.”

Full details of new season at scottishopera.org.uk

Portrait of Alex Reedijk by Kirsty Anderson; Irish National Opera’s Madama Butterfly by Ros Kavanagh

All Rise for EIF 2026

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After a thinner programme last year, the Edinburgh International Festival boasts a return to full strength on the road to its 80th anniversary celebrations next year, writes KEITH BRUCE.

Orchestral residencies from the Los Angeles and Berlin Philharmonics and Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s new post-pandemic opera The Galloping Cure are headline attractions in the full Edinburgh International Festival programme for August 2026, unveiled today.

The Mazzoli opera follows the acclaimed Breaking the Waves at EIF 2019 and reunites the composer with librettist Royce Vavrek, stage director Tom Morris and conductor Stuart Stratford in a production from Scottish Opera and Opera Ventures.

The cast is headed by Argentinian mezzo Daniela Mack, British soprano Susan Bullock and German baritone Justin Austin.

It joins the already-announced Zurich Opera production of Verdi’s A Masked Ball, a revival of Adele Thomas’s acclaimed 2024 staging, as the staged operas bookending the programme at the Festival Theatre.

Operas in concert at the Usher Hall are Mozart’s Don Giovanni from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Maxim Emelyanychev, with Konstantin Krimmel as Giovanni, Louise Alder as Donna Anna and Brindley Sherratt as the Commendatore, and Strauss’s Elektra from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Karina Canellakis with Irene Theorin in the title role, Vida Mikneviciute as Chrysothemis and Nina Stemme as Klytamnestra.

The Festival has a focus on work from across the Atlantic and its theme, All Rise, is the title of Marsalis’s epic Symphony No 1, whose 12 movements will be the Opening Concert at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 8, teaming the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and its founder, featured soloist and composer with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers, under the baton of James Gaffigan.

During the following week, the orchestra plays Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige with conductor Chris Crenshaw and then gives two concerts on the evening of August 12 with Yuja Wang at the piano in what is a world premiere collaboration. Marsalis, who is married to Festival director Nicola Benedetti, with whom he has a daughter, has recently announced that he will step down as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in the summer of next year.

The LA Phil residency comes in the final year of its conductor Gustavo Dudamel’s tenure as Music Director. Three concerts include two Beethoven symphonies, Nos 7 and 6, and a family concert teaming the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles with Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise musicians.

Zurich Opera brings Verdi’s A Masked Ball

The Berlin Phil and conductor Kirill Petrenko close the Festival on Sunday August 30 with Scriabin’s Symphony No 3, preceded by Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with soloist Augustin Hadelich. The previous evening the programme is Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4. A sextet from the orchestra gives the Queen’s Hall chamber music recital on the morning of Saturday August 29.

Other highlights at the Usher Hall include two concerts by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, the first of which is a rare modern-day performance of the full three-hours of Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song of Hiawatha with the Festival Chorus and tenor Nicky Spence among the soloists, and Sir Donald Runnicles conducting his old friends the BBC SSO and the Festival Chorus in Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, with soloists including mezzo Catriona Morison.

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra is in the pit at Edinburgh Playhouse for the visit of San Francisco Ballet. The European premiere of choreographer Aszure Barton’s Mere Mortals is danced to a score by Floating Points (Sam Shepherd), conducted by Martin West.

Colin Currie and his group play an all-Steve Reich programme, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London celebrate the Golden Age of Hollywood, and Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI perform an Atlantic-spanning early music programme.

A day of Bach at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 22 starts with an invitation to “Come and Sing” Chorales, and has Alisa Weilerstein playing all the cello suites and pianist Vikingur Olafsson giving a late evening concert.

There is a tribute to the late Scottish trumpeter John Wallace from the band he founded, The Wallace Collection in partnership with the Cooperation Band and musicians from all three Scottish orchestras under conductor Clark Rundell, and the Queen’s Hall programme includes a tribute to pianist Alfred Brendel in three recitals of music associated with the great stalwart of Festivals past by Steven Osborne, Paul Lewis and Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Debuts at the Queen’s Hall include those of mezzo Beth Taylor and guitarist Sean Shibe and that series opens with Dunedin Consort performing Tansy Davies’s new work Passion of Mary Magdelene with Anna Dennis and Marcus Farnsworth. Scottish Ensemble combines forces with small-pipes virtuoso Brighde Chaimbeul in another world premiere collaboration.

A full jazz, traditional music and folk programme at the EIF’s Royal Mile home, The Hub also includes Benedetti’s Classical Jam and a return visit from the global stars of the Aga Khan Music Programme.

Introducing her fourth Festival, Benedetti said: “Marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, we put America firmly in the spotlight. The American story is filled with innovation and ingenuity, perseverance and prejudice – tensions that have fuelled some of the most extraordinary artistic achievements in history.

“Our 2026 Festival is an invitation to All Rise together, and in doing so we celebrate not only artistic excellence but the resilience and flourishing of the human spirit.”

Tickets for EIF 2026 are on sale from noon on Thursday March 26 with priority booking for members and friends opening a week earlier. Full details at eif.co.uk

Picture of Zurich Opera’s A Masked Ball by Herwig Prammer; Nicola Benedetti and Wynton Marsalis by Carl Bigmore

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

EIF: Breaking Bach

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

AS Nicola Benedetti’s personal tribute to Yehudi Menuhin with the NFM Leopoldinum and Alexander Sitkovetsky recalled, the famous violinist had a close relationship with the Edinburgh Festival. He performed the Beethoven Violin Concerto in the 1950s and again in 1971, when he waived his fee as the cash-strapped event celebrated its 25th anniversary, having been awarded the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh in 1965.

At the 1985 Festival he was part of a series with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, built around Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, conducting in the Queen’s Hall and playing the Double Violin Concerto with John Tunnell in the Usher Hall. Memories of the engagements suggest that he was beyond his peak as a soloist and no great shakes as a conductor, but the Usher Hall concert also included a real curiosity in a performance by cellist Will Conway of the Solo Cello Suite No 3, danced by Rudolph Nureyev to choreography created for him by Francine Lancelot.

It was a piece that the then ailing Nureyev took around the world, and although the Benedetti tribute referenced those concerts in her choice of encore, Edward McGuire’s Fiddler’s Farewell, premiered at that time, it appears to be just a remarkable coincidence that this year’s Festival also featured dancing to J S Bach’s music for solo cello.

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s first cello Andrew Skidmore played movements from the First, Second and Fifth Suites in the middle of Breaking Bach, the OAE’s project with choreographer Kim Brandstrup. They were a showcase for the professional dancers in a performing ensemble that also included young people with street-honed hip-hop skills: a balletic trio to the Prelude from Suite No 1 and eloquent solos to the Courante from No 2 and Sarabande from No 5. The latter was especially effective, using the language of break dancing but performed in slow motion, and incorporating a staggered falling motif that had been introduced in the fast-pace movement earlier.

It was only one instance – although a particularly clear one – of Brandstrup’s choreography precisely echoing the shape of Bach’s writing. The music selection was very much a “greatest hits”, with the Double Violin being the first dance ensemble feature and Brandenburg No 3 its climax, when robotic walking gave way to movement that looked like “freestyling” but was anything but – again exactly reflecting the score.

Playing for dancers meant that the compact OAE, directed from the violin by Margaret Faultless, was metronomic, and that discipline only jarred in the Oboe Concerto in G minor (soloist Leo Duarte) where the requirements of the dancers and the flow of the music sometimes seemed at odds. With movements from the Orchestral Suites as interludes between the choreographed music – including, inevitably, the “Air on a G string” – there was some respite for the instrumentalists from the rigours of the beat, but the danced music was inevitably more compelling.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

EIF: Suor Angelica | Rising Stars

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Usher Hall | Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

In the competition among London’s five orchestras, if the London Symphony Orchestra still claims superiority it could be because of the responsiveness of its musicians. The final concert of the LSO’s Edinburgh Festival residency was very much new conductor Sir Antonio Pappano’s show, and the orchestra sounded very different from under his predecessor Sir Simon Rattle.

This was a big sumptuous pit band onstage, playing Italian music of more than a century ago with poise, style and no little swagger, and it was a delight to listen to. The main feature was a concert performance of Puccini’s Suor Angelica, the central part of his late Il Trittico, currently enjoying a global revival of fortune.

Before that, however, we heard two cracking concert openers. Puccini’s youthful work, Capriccio Sinfonico (1882), sets out his stall so comprehensively that it includes music that would be re-deployed in his operas, notably La boheme. The tapestry of themes featured beautifully measured brass and horns and signed off with the composer waving goodbye to orchestral writing in the strings.

Victor de Sabata is perhaps a role model for Pappano, although the distinguished Italian conductor may well have wanted to be better known as a composer. His Juventus (1919) is a feast of lush strings, rippling harps and Romantic winds that starts off sounding like a Hollywood score of 20 years later before taking a much darker turn and becoming more akin to the experimental writing of its own era. Conductor and players revelled in the orchestral colour in its packed 15 minutes.

The focus inevitably shifted to the singers for the opera, and Pappano’s team were almost all selected from his previous post at the Royal Opera House, many of them recruited through the Jette Parker Artists Programme. Both Patrick Barrett’s RSNO Youth Chorus and James Grossmith’s Edinburgh Festival Chorus acquitted themselves well, but the front line – 12 roles for women – inevitably grabbed the limelight.

In the lighter opening scenes the smaller parts had an opportunity to shine, and there was no weak link in this line-up, but the burden of the piece lay with soprano Carolina Lopez Moreno in the title role and Kseniia Nikolaieva as the Principessa. Their performances were rousingly and rightly acclaimed, but following fine staged productions of the work in Scotland recently, it was disappointing that only the mezzo had her part memorised.

Days later, at the Queen’s Hall, there was a chance to hear another group of emerging singers, these nurtured by the Festival itself under its “Rising Stars” banner, and mentored by teacher and pianist James Baillieu.

There were three Scots among the young men – tenors Euan McDonald and James McIntyre, both familiar to British audiences, and baritone Luke Terence Scott, who has largely worked elsewhere. English bass Peter Edge perhaps made the more coherent repertoire choices with his two Michael Head songs, but the others all had memorable inclusions in works by Reynaldo Hahn, Buxton Orr, Francis George Scott and the tradition Jacobite lament Yon The Castle Wa’.

Soprano Maryam Wocail’s recital-opener of Ivor Gurney’s Tears memorably set the melancholic tone for much that followed, with mezzo Nancy Holt’s All You Who Sleep Tonight, by Jonathan Dove, another interesting highlight. Soprano Emily Christina Loftus perhaps took the prize for boldness with one of Strauss’s Four Last Songs, while mezzo Camilla Seale provided the dramatic highlight with the Brecht/Weill Surabaya Johnny.

Keith Bruce

The World at The Hub

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As the Aga Khan Master Musicians take up residence at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, saxophonist Basel Rajoub talks to Keith Bruce.

The Edinburgh International Festival’s busiest venue is The Hub, where above the ground floor box office is a picturesque room that has hosted the widest variety of musical experiences. It is currently hosting the Aga Khan Music Programme – very much the public face of the Aga Khan Development Network – and on Friday that season culminates in a concert by the Aga Khan Master Musicians.

It is a supergroup of what are inadequately described as “world musicians”, including pipa player Wu Man, virtuoso percussionist Abbos Kosimov, Yurdal Tokcan on oud, Feras Charestan on kanoun and saxophonist Basel Rajoub, augmented for these concerts by French mavericks Vincent Pierani on accordion and Vincent Segal in cello, both of whom then have a late night gig with Malian kora star Ballake Sissoko.

Basel Rajoub would certainly dispute any claim to personifying the Master Musicians. Each one of them is a virtuoso who brings compositions to the table that are shaped by the ensemble, with plenty of room for improvisation. Nonetheless, his story, as a displaced Syrian now resident in Geneva where the project has its home, seems central to their ethos.

Rajoub has been a member of the Master Musicians since the resident ensemble was created in 2009. His route to playing the saxophone, and the fact that he plays it in a way outside both classical and jazz traditions, is a singular story.

“I studied Western classical music in Damascus Conservatory, but I studied trumpet until I had to give it up when I took a reaction to the mouthpiece in my lips at the age of 24,” he explains. “I switched to saxophone and I favour soprano because it is near to the range of the trumpet.

“Saxophone is a quite unique instrument, connected with jazz and classical in the West but more associated with traditional music in the Middle East, used at weddings and funerals and street parties. I love the sound of it.”

It is that heritage of Middle-Eastern classical music that Rajoub brings to the Master Musicians.

“I carry the Syrian classical tradition with me, but not like the oud, which is an instrument integral to that tradition, so there is an effort in making it work. I don’t want to be a Western classical musician or a jazz musician, I want to use my knowledge of scales and microtones, and the saxophone has some limitations for expressing that.”

The point in the performances of the Master Musicians is that they find a common language although coming from completely different backgrounds.

“We change a lot, and we have a lot of African music in our performances which is a different energy. But at the same time there are two Syrians in the band, me and the kanoun player, so our influence is always there. The project is always changing, always unique and different.”

There is no bitterness in his voice when he says that his father told him not to try to return to his war-torn homeland over a decade ago.

“I left Syria before the war in 2008. I didn’t want to go into the army, and I was last there to play in the opera house in 2011 just before the war. I came from Aleppo which was one of the centres of Syrian classical music, and even though the old city – and buildings 1500 years old – have been destroyed completely, the music will still be there. There is always hope in that.”

In some concerts, Rajoub says, the Master Musicians have played with a classical Syrian singer as part of the maintenance of that tradition, but mostly the music is new and specially written. The current concerts began with a residency in Lisbon where they all had time to compose.

The rest of the time Rajoub teaches in Geneva and his fellow musicians come to give masterclasses there. On their travels, the players often visit music schools and give community performances, as they will be doing in Edinburgh.

Personally, the saxophonist says he has found a situation of musical fulfilment.

“I have the chance to meet and play with great musicians who were previously unknown to me. This feels like a life project.”

The Aga Khan Master Musicians are at The Hub, Castlehill, Edinburgh on Friday August 22 at 7pm.

EIF: Orpheus and Eurydice / Book of Mountains and Seas

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Edinburgh Playhouse / The Lyceum

At the March launch of the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival programme, the Festival’s Head of Music, Nik Zekulin, conceded that the opera content was slighter than in other years.

On paper that may have looked the case, but the reality has felt rather different, and not only through the presence of opera in concert. Whether it inspired or consoled, or simply wore you down, the Festival opener, Tavener’s The Veil of the Temple, was in many ways operatic in scale and style. Its structure, in less epic form, found echoes in both the works presented as staged operas in the Festival programme, even if their music was very different.

With no opera at all in the Festival Theatre, given over to runs of theatre and dance productions, the big event was the use of Edinburgh Playhouse for Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, recreating an Opera Australia production by the director of physical theatre company Circa, Yaron Lifschitz, and his troupe.

Soprano Samantha Clarke, who sang Eurydice and Amor, personified this venture in that her career bounces between Australia and the UK. The Australian performers were joined on stage by the Chorus of Scottish Opera, whose set-builders also made the staging, and Handel specialist Lawrence Cummings conducted the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the pit.

Clarke was excellent, as were the chorus, but the star vocal turn of the show was counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, an EIF favourite who sang with extraordinary power and also engaged with the physical action, if not to quite the personally perilous degree the superbly-choreographed acrobats displayed.

Far from being in any way gimmicky, they told the story as eloquently as the text and music, from the dramatic trapeze descent of Eurydice to the Underworld to a nicely ambiguous interpretation of Gluck and librettist Calzabigi’s grafting of a happier ending on to the classical tale.

Although none of the forces involved were huge, the production needed the vastness of the Playhouse, and – just as importantly from the EIF’s point of view – attracted an audience that filled all of the seats.

Ancient Chinese myths inspire Huang Ruo’s opera, confronting humanity’s complex relationship with nature.

It is more debatable whether Huang Ruo’s Book of Mountains and Seas was any more “opera” than The Veil of the Temple had been. If one of the delights of the Gluck had been the realisation of the rich orchestration, Ruo’s music is sparer, if never quite as austere as Tavener’s often was.

The Chinese-born American resident is a composer of operas – and it will be interesting to see if this work was paving the way for an EIF run of a larger work – but this was a work for chamber choir and puppetry, using four of the ancient Chinese stories from the titular book.

Basil Twist, designer of the National Theatre’s Studio Ghibli adaptation My Neighbour Totoro, was director and his puppetry is of the modern school familiar from The Lion King and War Horse, and in the global perambulations of Little Amal and The Herd. If not so gasp-inducing, his six-strong team, who created galaxies of lantern suns, a bird princess, an archer god and a sprinting giant, supplied the parallel technical expertise to the Circa team in the Gluck.

The dozen singers of Ars Nova Copenhagen were in the Theatre of Voices mould, and directed by counter-tenor from that ensemble, Miles Lallemant. The constant flow between the male and female voices and between honed ensemble and some glorious solo singing was compelling, and Ruo’s music is delightfully hard to pin down, with a global range of influences but a voice entirely his own.

Often the most identifiably “Chinese” element of the sound came from the two percussionists, the only instrumental content and played with quite startling virtuosity. Even there, however, there were Latin American and African elements in what was truly the sound of “world music”.

Keith Bruce

EIF: Tribute to Menuhin

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

She has brought much more to the role of Festival director, including surprises, but this was surely a concert that the panel who appointed Nicola Benedetti to that role hoped she would make happen.

The violinist’s acute awareness of the event’s origins and history was particularly evident in the inspired choice of encore. It reprised a piece commissioned by Festival (and Traverse and Aldeburgh) stalwart Sheila Colvin from composer Eddie McGuire for Yehudi Menuhin to play in the mid-1980s, two decades after he had been awarded the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh.

There had perhaps never been the context to revisit The Fiddler’s Farewell, and certainly not one as appropriate as this, for which the composer was in the audience. As Benedetti explained at the start of the concert, she and the violinist/director of Poland’s NFM Leopoldinum, Alexander Sitkovestsky, were among the last pupils at the Yehudi Menuhin School in London to benefit from his personal teaching in the 1990s.

That shared experience particularly guided the selection of the works on either side of the interval. Directing the smallest group of strings we heard all evening, Sitkovetsky was the soloist in Andrzej Panufnik’s Violin Concerto, which Menuhin premiered. He also rehearsed it with the 15 year old Sitkovetsky but did not live to hear him play it for an audience.

The better part of 30 years later, this EIF performance revealed a polished gem of a work, not just part of the musical heritage of the Wroclaw players but also clearly influenced by American composers of the 20th century. The soloist’s playing gleamed but the ensemble playing was just as impressive, from the daringly quiet stillness of the Adagio to the vital energy of the Vivace finale.

Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins is one of his best-known works and Benedetti has been playing it all her life, starting with concerts in London and Paris that paired her with Alina Ibragimova under Menuhin’s baton when she was 11 years old. If she and Sitkovetsky had not performed it together previously you could never have guessed, so familiar were they both with the path through its swift 15 minutes. With a harpsichord joining the strings, they shared the direction of the band, but little work was required there either; this was joyous music-making from everyone on stage.

That also could be said of the two works for string orchestra that opened and closed the programme. Elgar’s Opus 20 Serenade for Strings was not included on her 2020 Elgar album, but is a work that has featured in the teaching syllabus of the Benedetti Foundation and sat perfectly at the start of this concert under her direction.

Bartok’s Divertimento for Strings was his follow-up to the highly original Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, with the last movement’s percussive effects provided by slapping pizzicato technique. Sitkovetsky was in charge for this work, with Benedetti his front desk partner, and he noticeably shifted the players up a gear after a slightly tentative start.

With some of the EIF’s Rising Stars of Strings augmenting the NFM Leopoldinum for this second evening in its brief residency, this was an occasion that summed up a great deal of what Benedetti’s Festival directorship is all about.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Andrew Perry

EIF: La clemenza di Tito

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Although he made a very brief one of opposition to the war in Ukraine at the beginning of March 2022, no-one looks to the SCO’s Russian Principal Conductor for political statements. Maxim Emelyanychev is a musician with every fibre of his being: “I live for the creation of music and art” he said in that same bulletin.

Nonetheless, it would be easy to see a message to belligerent leaders across the world in his odd choice of La clemenza di Tito for the third of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s concert performances of Mozart Opera’s at the Edinburgh Festival.

Not so many years ago the merciful titular Roman emperor, prepared to forgive betraying consorts as readily as would-be assassins, was seen as a bit of a sap in the canon of opera heroes; in 2025 his lack of vindictiveness looks like something we could use a deal more of.

That’s not the only reason that La clemenza is rarely seen as of the same rank as The Magic Flute and Cosi fan tutte, the operas Emelyanychev and the SCO have presented in the last two years. Dating, like the Flute and the Requiem, from the last year of the composer’s life, it was composed at astonishing speed to a lucrative commission from Prague, is thought to contain some recitatives that he farmed out to a pupil, and has had a very uneven performance history since 1791.

This EIF performance featured the unmistakable roar of the RAF Red Arrows adding a flypast to the Castle Esplanade’s Tattoo around fifteen minutes in, but everything else was under the firm, charismatic direction of the conductor, whose Mozart readings are now easily escaping the long shadow cast by the SCO’s partnership with Sir Charles Mackerras.

Emelyanychev worked his socks off in this concert, playing eloquent fortepiano continuo as well as directing orchestra and chorus and – just as assiduously – the cast of soloists.

And what a terrific cast he had. The opening partnership of mezzo Angela Brower as Sesto and soprano Tara Erraught as Vitellia – dramatic, full of character and powerfully sung – only hinted at the riches to come, even if those two deserved the prize laurels at the end. A little later in Act One, the uncannily parallel duet by Maria Warenberg’s Annio and Hera Hyesang Park’s Servilia is one of the score’s best tunes and the singers made the most of it.

If bass Pater Kalman’s Publio has an onstage musical partner it is not Tito but the Chorus, he the voice of the Senate and they that of the citizens. If he was authoritative, with a nice suggestion of perplexity at turns of events, Gregory Batsleer’s SCO Chorus was as marvellous as it reliably is, to the extent of prompting the wish that they had had more to do.

More of an unknown quantity in Scotland – although he will sing Germont at Covent Garden next year – was tenor Giovanni Sala, who brought a troubled vivacity and palpable vexation to his portrayal of Tito, as well as a very fine voice that was never at all strained by the demands of the score.

Those are considerable on the soloists, but Brower and especially Erraught were more than equal to the huge vocal range that they were required to demonstrate.

There may still be elements of the plot of La Clemenza that are hard to swallow, but that is true of many operas. Emelyanychev and this ensemble made a cast iron case for the music being of the very first rank.

Keith Bruce

Getting Physical with Gluck

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Once pipped for pop stardom, Iestyn Davies opted instead for success as a classical “yodeller”. The award-winning countertenor stars with Australian circus ensemble Circa in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. KEN WALTON reports.

It’s 30 years since the blistering Summer of Britpop, when Blur and Oasis led a hungry pack battling for pole position in the charts. Iestyn Davies was 15 that year, a musically-gifted pupil at the specialist Wells Cathedral School. He and three school pals – collectively the wannabe Britpop band Cage – were faced with a tempting offer to sign up for a record deal they were assured could easily lead to chart-topping success.

“Yes, the pop world lost out,” says the now 45-year-old Davies, who eschewed pop fame to become one of the world’s leading classical countertenors. He’s currently in Scotland to sing the male title role in director Yaron Lifschitz’s circus-led production of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice at the Edinburgh International Festival.

“We were huge fans of Blur then and all the other bands with one-syllable names, and were actually about to be victims of what would become a kind of Britain’s Got Talent thing, where the A&R people wanted to manufacture something cool rather than just let us do our own thing. 

“It was a big deal,” Davies recalls. “Atlantic Records, a branch of Sony, came to our school, we got selected, and against thousands of other bands got down to the last two. They said we’re really interested in you guys because you’re all really good musicians. We played songs to the A&R guy in our studio at school and he said with the right financial backing we could go to number one. Sure, we’d have made lots of money, but in the end it wasn’t for us.” In time, the constituent members of Cage went their separate ways to pursue careers in classical music.

For York-born Davies, there was an undeniable logic to his choice. By the age of eight, he’d experienced the hothouse choir school environment of the Oxbridge chapel, at St John’s College, Cambridge. It was a baptism of fire, he recalls, “a bit like being taught to swim. You’re thrown in at this early age to perform daily in this thing called choral evensong, initially imitating the boy next to you to pick things up. But the musicality I picked up there was invaluable: the ability to learn music quickly, sight read, be a good team player, be a professional musician. It’s why I’m doing what I do now.” 

It stood him in good stead when, on leaving secondary school, he took up a choral scholarship at Cambridge, studying archeology and anthropology, before honing his singing technique – he once compared the rarefied countertenor voice to “yodelling” – at the Royal Academy of Music. Prestigious awards followed in a career that has combined leading opera appearances (the New York Met and Covent Garden included) to acclaimed worldwide concert performances and prize-winning recordings. 

He’s no stranger, either, to the Edinburgh International Festival, though one previous visit lingers painfully in his memory. “I woke up the morning of a Queen’s Hall concert with absolutely no voice, nothing,” he recalls. He struggled in to the pre-concert run through, managing to squeeze out a sound. “The old chorister mentality hit in: if you can still sing a bit you’re doing it.” A friend who’d attended the same programme a few weeks earlier, and having heard the Edinburgh live broadcast, called him up to say it was even better than the York performance. “It just goes to show, you can never second guess the audience!”

Circa in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice (Image: West Beach Studio)

Did Davies ever envisage having to perform his first ever staged production of Gluck’s seminal opera Orpheus and Eurydice engaging so physically with a fully-functioning circus troupe? That’s the challenge facing him in this week’s unconventional Gluck production, unveiled with its original cast in Brisbane in 2019, now restaged for a European premiere at Edinburgh Playhouse that draws together the original combined resources of Circa and Opera Queensland with Opera Australia, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Scottish Opera Chorus, conducted by period music specialist Laurence Cummings.

When we spoke, Davies’s only inkling of the task in hand was via a video of an earlier Australian performance. “I saw immediately how amazing Circa are. You can hear the audience gasp right at the beginning as they do this tumbling thing from a great height. What’s amazing is that their acrobatics are as fluid as dancing. The hardest thing that I have to do physically comes late in the show, when I stand on someone’s shoulders, surrounded by three or four people who are anchoring my ankles. I can tell from the performer on the video – whom I know, and who’s very athletic – that it’s a scary moment.”  

Davies has since come to realise that, for his part, the physically of his role comes mostly in a more concentrated, more conducive form. “Yes, I have to carry quite a lot of the drama in my body, but a lot of that can be done standing still,” he explains. “Until I meet Eurydice in the underworld it’s just me and the chorus, but not in dialogue. Under such prolonged spotlight you have to find ways to project energy through stillness, which in itself is such a high-pressured thing because its very easy to slip unintentionally into concert mode. 

“This is such a psychological piece – really, it’s about what’s going on in Orpheus’s head – which is what Yaron is particularly trying to demonstrate in his production,” Davies says. “I asked him why he has conflated the two female roles of Eurydice and Amore, played by the same singer [Australian soprano Samatha Clarke], and the answer I got was that Orpheus has murdered Eurydice and wakes up in this fractured state, maybe in a prison, maybe an asylum.” 

This, Davies reckons, is where the “unworldliness” of the countertenor voice can really work its magic, closer in character to the castrato that Gluck originally intended than later tendencies to cast a female mezzo soprano in the role. Think Janet Baker, for whom this became a signature role. 

“There is something disembodied about the countertenor that is close to the castrato in terms of pitch, and of course we’re seeing a man play the hero,” Davies explains. “But equally it stretches the countertenor’s capabilities beyond that of the choral world, presented with a meaty chunk of singing, on stage for an hour and a quarter. It feels very different from singing even a Handel role where you’re one of five or six characters. You’re on stage all night; that challenges you to be interesting with your voice. You can’t rely on just ethereal beauty. There has to be pain, anger, melancholy, all range of emotions. That is what Gluck is asking. That’s the challenge to me.”

Whatever the physical demands placed on him, Davies is readying himself. “I’m generally very conscious of trying to stay healthy and fit at the moment anyway,” he says. Besides addressing “the odd creak on the knee or shoulder”, that means looking good too. “I’m playing David in [Handel’s] Saul at Glyndebourne at the moment. At the beginning I’ve just defeated Goliath and the whole show opens with me covered in blood, half-naked with a sling and a shot. I’ve been going to the gym three times a week, and trying not to enjoy myself too much. It’s a real pain, but in the long run it’s good to keep on top of these things.”

As for his relationship with Gluck’s most famous opera, it is dominating his working life at the moment. Davies previously sang the Orpheus role In a 2018 Edinburgh Festival concert performance with The English Consort, later recording it with La Nuovo Musica for Pentatone. “I was originally booked to debut in this current production with Circa in Melbourne in November/December, but that was before the Edinburgh dates came up; and now, between those, in September/October I’ll be performing in a Robert Carsen production with Canadian Opera in Toronto. It’s full on up to Christmas, but I doubt I’ll be sick of it.”

Nor can he get too much of the Edinburgh Festival. “I love coming to Edinburgh. It’s the most worthwhile place to sing in Britain, a great set-up and great audiences. They let me do things I want to do.” Including, perhaps, his new circus repertoire?

Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice is at the Edinburgh Playhouse on 13, 15 & 16 August. Full information at www.eif.co.uk

EIF: London Philharmonic/Gardner

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

In the year that the London Symphony Orchestra has a residency at the Festival under its new conductor, Sir Antonio Pappano, it is only realistic to suggest that a sell-out concert by the rival London Phil at the Usher Hall is probably down to the choice of repertoire and the popularity of conductor Edward Gardner, whose decade with the Bergen Philharmonic included acclaimed EIF appearances, including of opera in concert.

With a shared hinterland at Glyndebourne, Gardner and the London Philharmonic are a good fit, but the conductor continues to be based in Norway, where he is now music director of the national opera and ballet. Arguably the pre-eminent English conductor of his generation, the parallel with Pappano’s predecessor, Sir Simon Rattle, from the previous one, in finding life more conducive away from his homeland is interesting.

There was no opera music in this programme, but it featured some of the most colourful and popular orchestral music in the catalogue. Holst’s The Planets transcends its place as an early 20th century period piece – although it remains fascinatingly that as well in some of its thematic and musical detail – because it is packed with glorious melodic writing.

If everyone knows Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity, the big tune at the heart of the suite, most also recognise the threatening five-time march of Mars, the Bringer of War, that opens it and probably the ethereal choir in Neptune, the Mystic at its end. The offstage voices in this performances were those of the National Youth Choir of Scotland, its rigorously-trained young people for once spared the discipline of uniform.

As its earliest critics complained, The Planets can be seen as a derivative musical selection box, but that surely accounts as much for its popularity, the flavours of Wagner, Berlioz, Elgar, Dukas and Debussy all to be savoured in Holst’s rich orchestral score. Gardner ensured that all of those details, and unusual combinations of instruments, were perfectly served, and the arc of the suite as immaculately presented, but the louder moments seemed to lack a little verve in a performance that was faithful to all the ingredients but never more than the sum of its parts.

The LPO’s programme had begun with a much newer showcase for orchestra, Judith Weir’s Forest, a 1995 piece that has become quite a popular concert-starter. It fitted that role perfectly here, the ear-grabbing solo viola opening expanding into an exploration of the sounds of every section, an object lesson in making a small amount of melodic material go a long pictorial way.

As that work is also scored for a large band, some considerable stage re-setting was efficiently dispatched to accommodate the concert grand for Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Soloist Beatrice Rana plays the same work at the Proms at the end of the week, but there was no sense of a preparatory run-through in her beautifully-measured performance. Nor was there any chance of her succumbing to the temptations of showboating that the work offers; this was “rhapsodic” playing in the best sense of that word, crisp and clean when required but also beguilingly languid and lyrical.

Keith Bruce

EIF: Colin Currie / King’s Singers

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

In his early days, James MacMillan looked up to Steve Martland, a slightly older composer whose hard-edged style (and thorny politics) appealed to the young MacMillan seeking to hone his own identifiable voice in the 1980s. Fast forward forty years and the presence of a saucy new MacMillan commission within a programme designed around Martland’s belligerent Street Songs was – for those of us old enough to remember – a pertinent reminder of that influential link.

Of course, Martland is no longer with us – he died 12 years ago at the too-early age of 58 – so these performances by percussionist Colin Currie (on marimba) and The King’s Singers, signalling the start of the Edinburgh International Festival’s Queen’s Hall series, were strikingly nostalgic. 

The four songs – Poor Roger, Green Gravel, Jenny Jones and Oranges and Lemons – may not be Martland’s most consistently riveting pieces, but there’s no mistaking the combative, mischievous minimalism underpinning them that was once the feisty hallmark of the “bad boy” composer and his eponymous hi-energy band, of which Currie himself was a member.

Add to that The King’s Singers’ championing of the Street Songs (originally performed and recorded late last century with Evelyn Glennie) and Currie’s own five-year association with the legendary vocal group, and the connective potential of Saturday’s line-up was plain to see.

Poor Roger, with its multi-layered “Hippety Hops”, wasted no time in charging the atmosphere, the marimba’s muted insistence a kinetic dynamo to the Singers’ nimble acrobatics. Before the hypnotic freneticism of Green Gravel, Stanley Glasser’s Zulu-inspired Lala Mntwana offered a moment of sweetness and repose. The ensuing step back in time – to the haunting 17th century motet, Death Hath Deprived Me, of Thomas Weelkes – served its purpose in setting the mood and context for Roderick Williams’ contemporary response to that very composer, his own Death, Be Not Proud, rearranged for this programme for singers and marimba. 

This performance captured well the tempered anguish, neatly calibrated dissonance and expressive gestures of Williams’ poignant homage. Its final moments, like a ghostly reference to the original Weelkes, were strikingly reminiscent – and just as effective – as the plaintive homecoming ending achieved by Britten in his magical Lacrymae. 

The soft pop ballad Alive, by Brighton-born composer Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, offered a momentary glimpse of the old Saturday Night TV King’s Singers’ sound, itself a perfect way in to MacMillan’s A Bunch o’ Craws, a hilarious and virtuosic skit on the children’s ditty “Three Craws Sat Upon a Wa’”. With seven “craws” now in on the action (including a spoof vocal contribution from Currie) the focus was on quick fire entertainment, and a Glaswegian patois –  including the well-worn Taggart cliché “There’s been a murder!” – from the singers that would easily have passed muster in Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night. When MacMillan lets his hair down like this he proves himself an absolute master of his craft.

The second half completed the Martland sequence – an a cappella Jenny Jones that occasional sagged intonation-wise, and the versatile play-acting of Oranges and Lemons. It also brought us the sultry, atmospheric South African story-telling of Peter Louis van Dijk’s Horizons, sung, clapped and finger-clicked to haunting effect.

Missy Mazzoli’s Year of Our Burning, written in 2021 in response to the pandemic offered another “world premiere arrangement”, which lived more for its precious moments than as a convincing whole. So, too, Bryce Dessner’s Tromp Miniature for solo marimba had more an air of background music than anything more compelling. 

Compelling is exactly what’s needed in any encore, which Joe Duddell’s arrangement of Everything Everything’s I Want A Love Like This delivered to an audience hot for more. Martland, one sensed, would no doubt have approved.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Jess Shurte Photography)

EIF: The Veil of the Temple

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Composer John Tavener considered the eight-hour choral epic The Veil of the Temple to be his supreme achievement, presumably for more than just its epic duration. Its second ever complete performance ended with the full forces of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, Monteverdi Choir, and National Youth Choir of Scotland on the Usher Hall platform and lower reaches of the choir stalls chanting the Sanskrit mantra of Peace, “Om Shanti”.

The conductor who had magnificently held the entire performance together, Sofi Jeannin, even allowed herself to join in and let her energetic arms rest.

Backstage stories suggest that the journey to that moment was not always peaceful and Jeannin’s achievement even more impressive than it appeared from an audience perspective, and it is to be hoped that the conductor, who directed the Dunedin Consort’s St Matthew Passion in Easter 2024, now becomes part of team EIF, an ad-hoc company evident in the line-up for this event.

As well as its own chorus, the Festival’s sole staff musicians – excepting current director Nicola Benedetti – and celebrating their 60th birthday this year, that team always features the young singers of NYCOS, who have shown themselves capable of rising to any challenge the EIF throws their way.

We should also include Puerto Rican soprano Sophia Burgos, also an essential ingredient of last year’s opening concert La Pasion segun San Marcos, and here the promenading soprano whose arias, in tandem with the duduk of Hovhannes Margaryan, began each section of the work.

The transformation of the Usher Hall into a believable religious sanctuary rather than a concert hall was the work of Thomas Guthrie, singer and violin player as well as a director, and a crucial front-line member of the Alehouse Sessions band that gave a memorable “beanbag” concert at EIF 2024.

The most striking element of Guthrie’s staging was a stepped altar in the midst of those stalls beanbags, which bore candles indicating the progress through the eight “cycles” of the composition and on and around which the Monteverdi Choir and its step-out soloists performed. Beyond that, however, Guthrie placed singers just about anywhere they might feasibly go so that solo voices and choirs popped up amongst every section of the audience and sounded hauntingly off-stage from the foyer spaces – as well as sometimes entirely filling those choir stalls.

Whether his efforts, and Tavener’s music, translated into a spiritual experience rather than a durational one, is perhaps debatable. As the structure of the work revealed itself – those cycles revisiting the same material in incrementally changing ways as the forces involved built and the pitch rose, a tone at time – its predictability was not always a blessing. And although some of the choral music was sumptuous, the deliberate mono-tonal simplicity of much of the solo parts was a challenge.

In fairness, it was one to which the Monteverdi soloists rose bravely and effectively. Soprano Theano Papadaki and tenor Hugo Hymas delivered the work’s repeating sequence of beatitudes with passion, and bass-baritone Florian Stortz was superb with the Passion-tide Gospel utterances of Christ. A trio of resonant basses – Tristan Hambleton, Richard Weigold and Rob Macdonald – were as mobile in their solo appearances as Burgos.

Special mention should also go to the tenor soloist from the Festival Chorus, David Lee, who featured in the only section, Cycle 4, which did not include the Monteverdi Choir.

Like him, the player of the Usher Hall organ, David Goodenough, was unidentified in the programme. His drone note was the first sound of the afternoon, and for much of the performance that was all that he was required to do, but the full might of the instrument was heard at the end, when brass, horns and timpani from the RSNO also came into play. For the most part, the orchestra’s principal percussionist Simon Lowden and his section colleagues added the crucial spare instrumental ingredients, alongside specialists on Tibetan temple horn and Indian harmonium.

There was scarcely a note of these sonic details that the conductor did not precisely cue, but even more impressive was the attention Jeannin gave to the three choirs, no matter where they were singing from. The balance she achieved – in which it was still possible to appreciate their individual strengths – was truly remarkable.

It would have been asking too much for the choral performance to be flawless, but it was never less than excellent. This edition of the Monteverdi Choir, now directed by Jonathan Sells, sounded more admirable for the character of the individual voices within it than its ensemble sound, but its own Usher Hall concert may prove a better guide to that. Under the direction of James Grossmith, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus sings in a very precise and measured way and its quietest moments here were the most impressive.

There is a great deal of demanding rhythmic complexity in the vocal score of The Veil of the Temple, as well as a lot of music at the very top of the soprano range. In both these areas, it was the young singers of the National Youth Choir that delivered the goods beyond all reasonable expectation of their experience. Prepared by NYCOS founder Christopher Bell and directed by Mark Evans, this year’s cohort have already matched the huge contribution their predecessors have made to recent Festival programmes, with more opportunities to hear them in Festival and Fringe to come.

Keith Bruce

Pictures: Sofi Jeannin by Patrick Allen; Florian Stortz by Andrew Perry

Edinburgh’s gap year

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Funding austerity has shaped this year’s International Festival, writes Keith Bruce

Politically-astute EIF director Nicola Benedetti prefaced the media briefing revealing her third Festival programme with an enthusiastic acknowledgement of the recent funding announcement from Creative Scotland.

It increased support for an expanded list of client organisations and assured many more arts companies of multi-year funding. Far and away the largest sum goes to the Festival itself, £3.25m in the coming financial year, rising to £4.25m in 2027/28, and Benedetti described the news that came at the end of January as “pivotal” for the whole sector in Scotland.

It did, however, come too late for this year’s Festival, which she would later describe as “more compact” than those of her first two years, and which clearly took shape in a restricted financial climate.

The black cover of the 2025 programme has a cut-out in it that reveals the theme the director has given to this year, The Truth We Seek, printed on page three inside. That gap at the front is, unfortunately, mirrored by the holes in the grid at the back of the brochure that everyone uses to plan their Festival-going.

A new play starring Brian Cox, Make It Happen, is the first event, at the Festival Theatre, but  after its run nothing happens there for nearly a week, until Scottish Ballet unveils its new Mary, Queen of Scots for four performances, which is followed by another four days with no Festival programming in the theatre.

The smaller Lyceum is also “dark”, in terms of International Festival shows, for over a week of the EIF’s three. Its shows include three performances in this year’s much-reduced opera programme, of Huang Ruo’s Book of Mountains and Seas, directed by the Olivier Award-winning designer of My Neighbour Totoro, Basil Twist. The other staged opera, three performances of an Australian staging of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, is the only use the Festival makes of Edinburgh Playhouse this year.

That makes for a lot of gaps on the fold-out venue grid in the brochure. The only venues without big empty spaces in their calendar are the Usher and Queen’s Halls and the EIF’s Hub home.

There are two more operas in concert at the Usher Hall, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev continuing their journey through Mozart with La clemenza di Tito and a residency by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Antonio Pappano including Puccini’s Suor Angelica.

The EIF’s new Head of Music, Nicolas Zekulin, told Vox Carnyx that the event’s commitment to presenting opera hadn’t changed but the year-to-year reality always showed fluctuations.

“The opera offer this year fits in to what had been an ebb and flow. Last year’s was significant and substantial but the year before was less, so there has been a natural ebb and flow and I think this year fits into that pattern.

“Opera has multiple facets and this year has two unconventional productions, and sometimes those are the ones you want to show. The production in the Playhouse is about opening up that repertoire in a new way.”

It is the European premiere of the Opera Queensland production, made with the acrobatic troupe Circa, whose reputation was built at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This incarnation will have the SCO in the pit, Iestyn Davies as Orpheus and the Chorus of Scottish Opera, prepared by Susannah Wapshott.

In fact, as Benedetti noted in her presentation to the press, the 2025 Festival features all five of Scotland’s directly-funded national companies: the National Theatre of Scotland is Dundee Rep’s producing partner for playwright James Graham’s new Make it Happen and the RSNO performs both the Opening Concert of John Tavener’s epic The Veil of the Temple and the Closing Concert of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, where Scots mezzo Karen Cargill is one of the soloists.

Both of those also feature the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, which celebrates its 60th anniversary with a total of five concerts. It joins the LSO and Pappano for two concerts, performing in Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony and the Puccini opera, and the BBC SSO under Karina Canellakis for Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.

With the National Youth Choir of Scotland’s now-regular contribution to the Festival being that Opening Concert and one with the London Philharmonic under Edward Gardner and the RSNO Youth Chorus also involved in Suor Angelica, there is no shortage of local talent in this year’s line-up – perhaps a case of thrift, rather than charity, beginning at home.

Zekulin said that he was under no illusions about the realities of the Festival’s position when he took up his post.

“I was aware of the constraints from the start, and the need to be creative within a budget. Working within certain parameters is something we all do all the time, but this is an international festival so I still get to do amazing stuff – I can’t complain!

“What’s a gift for us with the recent funding announcement is that 2027 is the 80th anniversary of the Festival. That’s a signature moment and works out well for us. We can look at ’26 and ’27 in parallel and think about what that anniversary means.”

Other musical visitors this year include residencies by the youth orchestra from New York’s Carnegie Hall, NYO2, and Poland’s  NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra from Wroclaw, with whom Benedetti will appear as violin soloist. There are also concerts by the orchestra of the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, Ivan Fischer’s Budapest Festival Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Monteverdi Choir with the English Baroque Soloists and the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon.

The Queen’s Hall programme kicks off with the intriguing combination of percussionist Colin Currie and The King’s Singers and includes an equally promising programme from mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, as well as more familiar names including baritone Florian Boesch, Benedetti’s former trio partners Leonard Elschenbroich and Alexei Grynuk, the Dunedin Consort and the Belcea Quartet.

Public booking for EIF 2025 opens at noon on March 27 eif.co.uk

Picture of Nicola Benedetti in the Usher Hall by Ryan Buchanan; Orpheus & Eurydice by West Beach Studio

EIF: Philharmonia Orchestra

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Usher Hall/Broomhouse Hub, Edinburgh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keith Bruce

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

EIF: Emelyanychev; Kanneh-Mason; Bostridge

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

As a constant presence in the Edinburgh International Festival, the Queen’s Hall 11am concerts have once again proved a regular comfort blanket at that brunch time of the day. But there’s a change this year that seems hard to justify, and which has lessened the completeness of the experience. 

For whatever reason – and I’m guessing production and commissioning costs may be a factor – the Festival has ditched its comprehensive programme booklets and replaced them at the extreme with skimpy free leaflets. The programme listings are skeletal, any notes to clarify context are either minimal or non-existent. Okay, you can unfold it to reveal a frankly useless poster, but there has to be a happy medium where better quality information can be articulated.

So thank goodness for the music. 

Tuesday was pure entertainment with a touch of class. This was Maxim Emelyanychev & Principals of the SCO, in other words conductor and players, but with the effervescent Russian maestro swapping his baton for a fortepiano. The music was exclusively Mozart – at least that’s what the meagre programme sheet told us – whereas Emelyanychev chose to insert Haydn’s acrobatic Fantasia in C where an Improvisation was indicated, albeit personalised by him turning Haydn’s “lunga” pauses into pure Victor Borge moments where endless waits – twiddling of thumbs – drew the laughter as intended.

But that was the magic of this programme, good-humoured repartee mixed with classy music-making. Emelyanychev was joined firstly by violinist Stephanie Gonley, violist Max Mandel and cellist Philip Higham in Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, a work constructed around intricate interplay that was playfully realised by the ensemble: a robust opening Allegro and spring-like Rondo finale separated by one of the composer’s most heart-stopping Andantes.

Clarinettist Maximiliano Martin brought contrasted texture to the ‘Kegelstatt’ Piano Trio in E flat, a performance in which he and Mandel jostled lyrically, initially reflectively, and ultimately with heightened spirit. After the Haydn intermission came the meat of the programme, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 12, K414 – the smaller A major compared to the later K488 – in a string chamber version that expanded the original group to include violinist Marcus Barcham-Stevens and double bass Nikita Naumov.

It was a triumph of scale, the sparkling delicacy of Emelyanychev’s fortepiano an integral yet dominant answer to the intimacy of the wider ensemble – a tasteful protagonist. In truth, it was also a much more cleanly assured performance than the concert opener, in which the apparent use of gut strings required some settling in.

For the following day’s cello-piano duo recital by Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Harry Baker, the repertoire was a lighter mix, founded on the principle that Bach’s influence threaded through it, and that his influence straddled the worlds of classical and jazz. In the latter camp, Baker’s velvety jazz persona held sway, adapting the coolest of numbers by Bill Evans (Waltz for Debby – Kanneh-Mason striking up a mean walking bass), Pat Metheney (the gentle whimsy of James) and the upbeat soul of Laura Mvula’s Green Garden. Kanneh-Mason collaborated in a laid-back arrangement of La Havas’ Sour Flower. 

Two Janacek works – more Baker arrangements in a steely selection of Moravian Folksongs and a straight but expansive reading of the Czech composer’s Pohádka – and the pair’s jointly composed Prelude and Fugue (a mixed success in the style of Shostakovich) completed the opening half.

Bach’s solo Cello Suite No 1 wove a binding thread through the second half, Kanneh-Mason’s warm performances (if occasionally rocked by ill-tuned double-stopping) sitting prettily with the stylistic offshoots of he and Baker’s free-flowing improvisation on Bach’s chorale “Ich ruf zu dir”, the heightened rhythmic idiosyncrasies of music from Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No 2, and a dizzy sign-off duo arrangement of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D flat minor.

Thursday’s Lieder recital promised its own curiosity factor, the combination of Ian Bostridge and Steven Osborne in a programme that wrapped Schubert’s song cycle Schwanengesang around four miscellaneous settings of appropriate verse. It was often painful to watch. How on earth does Bostridge pull such agonised facial contortions, as if Munch’s The Scream has come horrifyingly to life? Neither Rellstab’s or Heine’s poems necessarily warrant such histrionics, yet away from the visual agony there was considerable depth and lyrical poignance in the tenor’s delivery. 

Indeed, he and Osborne made a profound coupling, the Scots pianist complementing Bostridge’s intensity with deep, searching tone production and instinctive responses to the singer’s expressive freedom. From the calm of Liebesbotschaft to the literary cuckoo in the nest – the breezy closing setting of Seidl’s Die Taubenpost – it was the sense of unwavering conviction that won the day. The centrally inserted songs offered a breath of fresh air in the midst of the heat.

Ken Walton

EIF: Cosi fan tutte

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

The librettos Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote for Mozart pose problems for modern audiences which opera directors love to wrestle with, not always to the benefit of the works or, indeed, the ticket-buyers. As SCO Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev has mischievously said, one of the benefits of concert performances is the absence of that input.

Directing Cosi fan tutte from the fortepiano, he and his cast of six absolutely top-notch soloists demonstrated that the work not only survives but thrives without the benefit of a full production. The quality singers, led by Golda Schultz as Fiordiligoi and Angela Brower as Dorabella with Christopher Maltman as superb as you’d expect in the role of Don Alfonso, could not overshadow the fact that this was musically Emelyanychev’s show.

From the distinctive pacing of the familiar overture to the oddly ambivalent sextet at the work’s close, when Da Ponte undoubtedly pulls his punches even if Mozart is still at full throttle, the conductor was all over the score. Many conductors leave star soloists to get on with it and concentrate on their orchestra in such performances, but that is not Emelyanychev’s way and he was rewarded with full engagement from his singers, playful flirting and playground joshing included.

A particular strength of Cosi is that the whole story, in all its ludicrous detail, is sung with great clarity, so the absence of full costuming and silly disguises matters not a jot if the audience is listening (and reading the surtitles). The singers did enough in the costume department, but were crucially all highly mobile. That was especially true of the clowning of Josh Lovell and Huw Montague Rendall as Ferrando and Guglielmo, but also of Maltman and especially Hera Hyesang Park as Despina, who perhaps pushed the boat out too far at times with her brusque characterisation of the mercenary chambermaid.

The singing from all six, and by the SCO Chorus in their contributions, was consistently superb. For all the animation onstage, the cast contrived to disappear into the wings to give each other full focus during many of the solo arias, while the ensembles, whether huddled together as Don Alfonso sympathises with the deserted women or scattered across the platform for the Act 1 sextet, were all excellently well balanced.

The augmented SCO was on similarly stellar form, the quality of playing undoubtedly lifting the singers to their best game. How they managed not to giggle at some of the more outrageous keyboard ornamentation Emelyanychev added to his continuo playing remains a mystery.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Andrew Perry

EIF 2024 Opening Concerts

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Taken at face value, the strap-line Nicola Benedetti has given to her second year’s programme – Rituals That Unite Us – would seem to suggest a familiarity to her offerings quite contrary to the aspirations of an exciting and inspiring International Festival.

Fortunately, there will be few among those who filled the Usher Hall on its opening weekend who knew much of  what they listened to, at least in the form we heard it.

Although the historically-informed performance movement has ensured that we can now enjoy Bach’s St Matthew Passion in something close to the version heard in Leipzig in Easter 1727, it may not have come down to us at all without the input of Felix Mendelssohn a century later. In revisiting Mendelssohn’s arrangement, performed by the BBC SSO under Ryan Wigglesworth, Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the RSNO Youth Chorus and a star cast of soloists, the Festival uncovered a fascinating work.

A victim of nothing more than changing fashions, Mendelssohn’s version achieves an enormous amount on its own terms. The balance between his more substantial orchestration – including four flutes, alongside the clarinets which were yet to be invented in Bach’s day – and the large choral forces, makes a great deal of musical sense. The soloists mostly dealt well with that, only mezzo Sarah Connolly occasionally sounding a little under-powered.

The later composer scores much for a smaller chamber orchestra within the ranks in any case, while the continuo for the recitatives benefits hugely from the involvement of a handful of string players. Even the forte-piano, which sounded plain weird at the start, became an acceptable part of the mix as the work went on. And it doesn’t go on quite as much, the fewer chorales working more like punctuating interludes, and the unfolding narrative altogether more integrated.

Ed Lyon and Neal Davies were a nicely contrasting pair as Evangelist and Jesus, and tenor Laurence Kilsby took his Part 1 aria especially well, with the accompaniment of oboe and a string quintet before the choir and fuller orchestration giving it a special character. Soprano Elizabeth Watts, on top form throughout, also benefitted from the Mendelssohn arrangements, although some did seem a little too “chocolate box”.

Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos was a commission for the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of J S Bach’s death at the Millennium, and the choir which debuted and has championed it, Schola Cantorum de Venezuela, were joined by soloists also closely associated with the work. Significantly, the bulk of the vocal forces was supplied by the National Youth Choir of Scotland, beyond much debate the only “local” chorus capable of performing it with such style.

All under the authoritative baton of Joana Carneiro, the instrumentalists were strings and brass from the RSNO, guest-led by Ania Safanova with the crucial addition of jazz trumpeter Ryan Quigley, alongside Latin American percussion, guitar, piano, accordion and bass, with two male dancers also part of the eclectic mix, culminating in an explicit representation of the crucifixion.

The movement that is integral to the score extends to the choir, and NYCoS dealt with those demands as effortlessly as the visiting choristers, “off the book” for the most mobile sections.

Goilijov’s sound-world is dizzyingly expansive, but everyone onstage took its twists and turns in their stride. The ritual of this Pasión constantly challenges expectations, the darkest moments of the story often set to the most rhythmic music, and the most lyrical writing – often for female singers Luciana Souza and Sophia Burgos – sitting alongside more abstract, extended vocal sonic techniques. The composer’s musical references are just as wide, taking in Handel (Messiah’s Behold and See, from Lamentations) as well as Bach and concluding with Kaddish from his own Jewish faith.

Cantorum de Venezuela shares their diverse repetoire from sacred hymns to Latin American pop culture at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh.

On Monday there was an opportunity to hear Schola Cantorum de Venezuela in their own right, at the Queen’s Hall under the direction of Maria Guinand and Luimar Arismendi. In assembling the programme, Guinand may well have defined that “Rituals” festival strap-line better than anyone, following a contemporary Christian music first half with an even more startling sequence after the interval, mostly of Latin American music but with Canadian R Murray Schafer’s Magic Songs – five of his slyly political “Chants” – at its heart.

Part of Venezuela’s globally-influential El Sistema music education initiative, Schola Cantorum sound and perform in a style all their own. James MacMillan’s slightly over-familiar O Radiant Dawn was one of their more easy-listening offerings, but it had an original visceral edge, while the two approaches to The Lamentations of Jeremiah that bracketed it – by Ginastera and Grau – showed the range of abilities among the 17 singers: stratospheric sopranos and sonorous basses, then slides, yelps and claps.

The lighter fare of the second half, also interspersed with trickier stuff, was often very funny indeed – but once again there can have been vanishingly few among the EIF’s faithful morning recital audience who had heard a single note of it before.

Keith Bruce

Pictures by Andrew Perry

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: Simón Bolívar / Dudamel

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

The benchmark for Edinburgh Festival Mahler performances by orchestras of a younger membership was well and truly set by the Gustav Mahler Jugendrochester under Claudio Abbado in the 1990s. Their Mahler 7 has gone down in the annals as seminal, exceptional and thoroughly mind-blowing. The same cannot be said for the performance on Saturday of Mahler’s First Symphony by the Simón Bolívar Orchestra of Venezuela.

True, the Venezuelans are officially no longer a youth orchestra, but age eligibility remains limited at the upper end to 28, so they resemble in that sense their Vienna-based counterpart. And just as the GMJ benefited way back from Abbado, the Bolívars have as their champion and music director the now internationally-renowned Gustavo Dudamel. Not even his presence on Saturday, however, nor the numerous pockets of Venezuelan flag-waving fans cheering amid the near-capacity audience, managed to raise this Mahler to the levels of brilliance we might have hoped for.

It began promisingly, a magically-suppressed strings pianissimo challenged by the distant prodding of offstage trumpets, establishing a mood of threatening unpredictability, excitable wonderment that would prevail in various guises for the ensuing hour. Dudamel knew exactly what he was about, clearly envisioned, a paragon of authority and self-belief. 

What he didn’t always get was the same in return. While much of the bigger picture was fundamentally impressive – a wild symphonic adventure through earthy Ländler and parodic Klezmer, the ironic funereal play on the tune Frère Jacques, the whooping delirium of the finale – the devil was in the detail, and an orchestral response less self-assured in its finer execution. Shaky intonation, evenness of tonal balance, even nervous attack moments were frequent irritations.

The concert had begun on home territory, with recent music by two Venezuelan composers. The first, the hi-energy Guasamacabra by Paul Desenne, who died earlier this year and was a cello alumna of the orchestra, was fittingly dedicated in this performance to the composer’s memory. It’s sidestepping charm, insatiable energy and volcanic complexity made for an ear-catching opener, yet Dudamel unearthed beneath its deceptive, John Adams-like freneticism a golden melancholy that offered flashes of emotive depth which the later Mahler could well have done with. 

Gonzalo Grau’s Odisea (Concerto for Cuatro and Orchestra) proved the novelty act, featuring the popular Venezuelan cuatro ( a small 4-stringed guitar) player Jorge Glem. Glem, in his trademark red hat, cut a cool figure, the focus of the work more geared towards showcasing him, perhaps, than offering anything of much interest for the orchestra. 

They operated mainly in a support capacity, much of it benign underscore with the periodic requirement to emerge with link material. Yes, it was colourful in a classical-folk-rock cross-genre sort of way, and Glem’s freely extended technique, combined with exotic percussion dialogue, was a crowd-pleaser. His quirky encore quoted everything from Bach to Beethoven and Bizet, but seemed a tad indulgent when the concert was already running well over time.

Not that this prevented Dudamel and the entire orchestra, itself, from unleashing their own carnival-style encores after the Mahler. It’s what we tend to remember them for. In showstoppers by Strauss and Bernstein (razzed up Caracas-style), they duly obliged.
Ken Walton

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