VoxCarnyx

Usher Hall/Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

It is hard to imagine any previous director of the Edinburgh Festival getting away with Nicola Benedetti’s wholly admirable teacher-like approach to silencing the menace of mobile phones in the concert hall. On the opening day of EIF 2026 she twice instructed audiences to check that their devices were switched off and then paused to watch while everyone did. Audibly, the tactic worked.

The Festival’s slogan for this campaign is “Tune out the outside world” and it also spoke, with interesting ambiguity, to the music on offer that first day.

Tansy Davies composed her Passion of Mary Magdalene because she “felt it was time to listen to the voices not only left out, but taken out, of the Passion narrative.” As well as a the titular follower of Christ, sung by Anna Dennis, that included the wife of Pontius Pilate, a step-out role for mezzo Sarah Anne Champion, one of a vocal ensemble of seven behind the soloists.

Christus was sung by baritone Marcus Farnsworth, in a forceful characterisation that was very much of a piece with the work’s radical intentions. Commissioned by the Dunedin Consort with the Festival and London’s Barbican, this 80-minute work can creditably take its place alongside Sir James MacMillan’s 21^st century additions to the genre Johann Sebastian Bach pioneered.

As well the singers, the Dunedin’s John Butt directed an instrumental ensemble of 15 – early instruments and gut strings, and the crucial addition of an electric guitar which added percussion effects as well as more recognisable sounds, but always at discreet volume.

With harpsichord and bass lute completing the rhythm section, the strings were often used individually as foils to the singers – notably John Crockatt’s viola partnering Farnsworth – and a five-piece wind section of bassoon, oboes and flutes-doubling -recorders added powerful colours to the score.

Davies makes huge demands of the singers, and it was not only Dennis – predictably unperturbed by the huge leaps of pitch in Mary Magdalene’s part – who produced the goods. Stratospheric soprano Ana Beard Fernandez was superb in the work’s first section, and a crucial element of the score from its opening to the end was the trio ensemble of the three women, completed by alto Rosie Parker.

The four male voices – countertenor Tom Lilburn, bass Christopher Webb and tenors Ed Woodhouse and Thomas Kelly – more often featured singly or in duet and again there was no weak link among them.

The work is filled with memorable moments; the first utterance of this Jesus is “Shut Up!” and his Palm Sunday arrival in Jerusalem comes with the clearest of sound-pictures of the donkey’s gait and braying. Much of the text is recognisable from scripture, but Davies also uses sources that didn’t make the final cut of the Bible to produce a very thought-provoking narrative from the female perspective. The teasing carnality of the institution of the Sacrament of Communion at the Last Supper, which sits at the centre of her work, may be its most controversial moment, and Dennis produced her very finest singing to make sure every nuance was revealed.

What is unarguable about this new piece, even if Davies’s music is not to everyone’s taste (although it was enthusiastically acclaimed here), is that the composer has structured her work perfectly. In seven clear sections over three distinct parts, the story-telling could not be clearer or the words and music more precisely matched.

That is not true of the first orchestral work by jazz trumpeter – and husband of Benedetti – Wynton Marsalis, which was revived as the Opening Concert in the Usher Hall and the title of which, All Rise, adopted as the label for the entire EIF 2026 programme.

Marsalis was commissioned to write his “Symphony No 1” by Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic, who premiered it in December 1999, and it has been recorded by the Los Angeles Phil and Esa Pekka Salonen, but opportunities to hear the vast 12-movement work (also in three sections in this performance) are not common.

That is most easily explained by the vast forces under the baton of conductor James Gaffigan, who is also on the podium for Marsalis’s more recent Concert for Orchestra, which receives its UK premiere from the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms this week.

The trumpeter was onstage as a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra, which he is in the final year of four decades of leading. Around those 16 top-rank jazz players sat the RSNO, with a vast array of percussion at the back between the instrumentalists and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus joined by the soulful specialists of the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers.

At full strength, more than 200 musicians made a great gospel noise, and that blues-derived music is at the core of the work, incorporating the text of some of the Lord’s Prayer in what is often – but not always – a devotional work.

If Davies’s Passion is challenging to a conventional view of Christianity, Marsalis seems to want to place faith in the context of personal development and community cohesion in All Rise. Others may have heard it differently, and that may well be the work’s strength as well as its problem.

Perhaps, in his upcoming retirement from band-leading, Marsalis might rework parts of All Rise as orchestral suites or choral pieces that may win more performances, because many sections would certainly stand alone and the Ellington-esque Expressbrown Local (the 10^th movement) was an ideal trailer for the JLCO’s concert of the Duke’s music in the same hall three days later.

Like the earlier Queen’s Hall concert, however, All Rise was full of moments that will live in the mind for many years. The soloing of the jazzers – including one from Marsalis himself – was matched by that of the RSNO front desks, even if those were not improvised, while the Festival Chorus had as much soul as the chamber choir, even if it provided the startling soloists.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Anna Dennis with Dunedin Consort by Matt Beech; Conductor James Gaffigan by Andrew Perry