Edinburgh
joe.muggs
This album promises to be an expansion of the sound and ideas of its 2021 predecessor Heart Shaped Scars, and boy does it deliver. HSS was the Scottish singer-songwriter Dot Allison’s first album in some nine years, and only her seventh in the 28 years since she first appeared with the space-dub-country-torch-song trio One Dove. And it was a delicate album, built on generations of the purest psychedelic folk, a perfect soundtrack for emerging from the shock of peak COVID, full of the intimacy of isolation and fears for the world, but renewed love of nature. Consciousology Read more ...
Simon Thompson
What’s better than having a star soloist on the billing for a concert? Three star soloists! The Royal Scottish National Orchestra billed this concert as its “All Star Gala”, and that’s more than just a shrewd marketing move (though it was that: this was the busiest audience they’ve had all season). It’s an entirely fitting title for a concert that features Nicola Benedetti on violin, Sheku Kanneh-Mason on cello and Benjamin Grosvenor on piano, all brought together to perform Beethoven’s Triple Concerto.While they’re here, however, the orchestra wisely decided to put their guests’ talents to Read more ...
David Kettle
How do you cram a thousand-page novel, a cast of dozens and profound philosophical ponderings on love, fidelity, class and freedom into a two-and-a-half hour stage show? If you’re Lesley Hart – adapter of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre (from where it hops down south to Bristol Old Vic in June) – it’s with nimbleness, clear-sighted focus, and really quite a lot of swearing.We’ll come back to the profanities. In terms of adaptation, though, Hart’s stage version has a lot going for it. Okay, it inevitably feels crammed-in at times – the famously tone-setting grisly end for Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
From the outset, it was clear that this would be a performance of immaculate sonic architecture. Over a soft, deep, and breathy organ pedal the first utterings of the strings sounded tentative, almost improvised, like an artist making the first daubs on a vast empty canvas.Likewise the chorus entry on "Selig sind", at the same time both hesitant and mysterious, yet perfectly controlled. In keeping with his reputation, there was no doubt that conductor Maxim Emelyanychev knew exactly what he wished to achieve with this performance of Brahms’ A German Requiem with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Read more ...
Simon Thompson
When a publication as venerable as Gramophone features an artist on its front cover, it’s a surefire sign that they’ve hit the big time. This month that honour fell to young American violinist Randall Goosby and, coincidentally, he was the soloist for this week’s concerts with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. I hadn’t come across him before this double encounter but, if his Usher Hall performance is anything to go by, then the hype around him is justified.The beauty, poetry and sheer confidence of his performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto was a marvellous thing to witness. Partly Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Two women featured prominently in this programme; the one a composer and the other a conductor.To the composer first. Long before she hit New York big time, Anna Clyne was at Edinburgh University, so there’s a strong link with Scotland that the Scottish orchestras aren’t afraid to exploit. Her 2015 piece This Midnight Hour might have been inspired by two delicate poems, but its mood and tone have the sweep of a film score, and a dashed exciting one at that.The opening is a turbulent eruption from the cellos and basses, leading into jagged shards of music that seem to flicker in the light like Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
On paper, the formula shouldn’t be that special. Really good music played by really good people is hardly a groundbreaking concept; but in actuality it’s seldom found with such honesty and diversity as in Pekka Kuusisto’s recent residency with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. The first two of the triptych of concerts were with Americana/Folk singer and multi-instrumentalist Sam Amidon, and began with a set centred around Janáček’s First String Quartet "The Kreutzer Sonata". The quartet takes its name from a novella by Leo Tolstoy whose protagonist is an abusive and jealous husband Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
After full orchestral performances of Brahms’s Violin Concerto and First Symphony, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra shone a more intimate light on the composer’s oeuvre with a recital of chamber works in Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall on Sunday.Having made his SCO debut as the soloist in the Violin Concerto on Thursday and Friday, Russian violinist Aylen Pritchin joined a few members of the orchestra, as well as Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev (pictured below by Christine Kernohan) at the keyboard, for some smaller scale works. Pritchin gave a calm sensitivity to Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 2, Read more ...
David Kettle
You’d hardly call a director particularly perceptive for highlighting Lady Macbeth as the true power behind the throne, scheming and cajoling her husband’s bloody ascent to the crown. In her audacious, provocative and thoroughly compelling Macbeth (an undoing), however, writer/director Zinnie Harris goes much, much further – so far, in fact, that a couple of her characters seem confused as to whether Lady Macbeth is herself the King.Harris modestly subtitles her rethink "after Shakespeare" – it’s the latest in her ongoing collection of rethinks of classic texts that have included This Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
This was one of those rare occasions when a somewhat diverse collection of pieces knits together into a rather satisfying programme. To start at the end, the Saint-Saëns “Organ” Symphony is a rumbustious crowd pleaser not least because of its theatrical appeal: the lone organist sitting way above the orchestra unleashing the final peroration in a great surge of full-fat romantic harmony.“Feel how it moves the air”, as the late great Carlo Curley once told me, of the then partially defunct Usher Hall organ. Now in fine fettle, this great civic instrument by Norman and Beard makes light work of Read more ...
Simon Thompson
It’s not an opera, of course, but of all Handel’s oratorios, Saul is probably the one that is best suited to being presented as an actual drama. Several productions, most notably Barrie Kosky's at Glyndebourne, have shown how it can work on stage, but this performance at the Edinburgh International Festival proved that you can have a great evening’s drama with nary a prop or costume in sight.The key to Saul’s dramatic success is partly the condensed nature of its story but, more importantly, the vast range of music colours that Handel draws upon. It’s the most diverse orchestra he used in any Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This is the Pavel Haas Quartet’s second visit to a Scottish festival this summer. They were among the stars of the East Neuk Festival at the start of July, and they were every bit as scorching in this Edinburgh International Festival concert.The keynote was a beautiful sense of balance, be it the balance of the four musicians, or the balance of major and minor in Schubert’s final quartet. In the first of Haydn’s Opus 76 quartets, with which the concert opened, the balance was between seriousness and fun, something evident right from the start where they played Haydn’s opening smile with a Read more ...