Edinburgh
Simon Thompson
Say what you like about this year’s slimmer-than-usual Edinburgh International Festival, but when it has hit the spot, it has done so triumphantly. Nowhere has that so far been truer than in the piano playing, as this pair of concerts demonstrated. In the Queen’s Hall on Tuesday morning, Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy joined forces in a programme of four-handed piano (★★★★★), sometimes on one keyboard and sometimes on two, that climaxed in a transcendent, dazzling, occasionally stupefying performance of Messiaen’s visionary Visions de l’Amen. From the very opening, Kolesnikov played Read more ...
Simon Thompson
NYO2 is a group of dazzlingly talented (and terrifyingly young-looking) 14-17 year olds from the USA, one of Carnegie Hall’s three national youth ensembles, and with a focus on supporting young musicians from communities that are under-represented in the arts. This Edinburgh International Festival concert marked their European debut, and they’re doing a miniature residency in Edinburgh that, in another concert, involves them playing alongside some talented young Scots. Whatever their age, they can certainly play. Perhaps the only concession to their inexperience came from conductor Read more ...
David Kettle
Lost Lear, Traverse Theatre ★★★★A rehearsal room; a tense preparation session for a production of King Lear, provocatively gender-swapped; a troublesome diva in the title role; and a near-silent understudy barely able to contribute.Dan Colley’s compelling ensemble piece has a big twist early on, then several further shifts in emphasis and direction that keep the audience guessing throughout, and which also force a reappraisal of everything you’ve just seen. But his central conceit offers apparently endless – and often contradictory – insights. Iconic Irish actor Joy is in a care home, where Read more ...
David Kettle
You could distinctly hear the murmurs of recognition from the Edinburgh audience – responding to knowing mentions of the city’s Leith and Morningside areas, the building of Royal Bank of Scotland’s immense Gogarburn HQ, the institution’s towering greed and ambition – during James Graham’s epic new history of RBS, its single-minded CEO Fred Goodwin and the 2008 financial crisis that was unveiled at the Edinburgh International Festival.There are clearly still-fresh memories, unresolved issues, unhealed wounds about Goodwin’s decade in charge that transformed RBS into the biggest bank in the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rhys Darby, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★Rhys Darby, the New Zealand actor and comic best known as Murray Hewitt in Flight of the Conchords, is back at the Fringe after nearly a decade away with The Legend Returns.It’s an elaborate tale about the march of AI – “Fuck, that horse has bolted” – which, true to form, he tells with great warmth. There’s a mix of physical comedy, daft voices and impressions (from helicopters to electric cars) and silly storytelling, with a generous flow of gags – verbal, aural and physical – thrown in.The hour takes us on a journey involving tech bros, domestic Read more ...
David Kettle
I’m Ready to Talk Now, Traverse Theatre ★★★★There are, inevitably, certain challenges when reviewing a one-to-one immersive show that’s already pretty much sold out its entire Edinburgh Fringe run (though there are rumours of some last-minute additional tickets for I’m Ready to Talk Now being released). For a start, influencing potential audience members to buy or not buy a ticket goes almost entirely out the window. In addition, giving too much away might spoil the impact of Oliver Ayres’s brief, fragile but hugely powerful creation for those who have already booked.All that said, it’s the Read more ...
David Kettle
Alright Sunshine, Pleasance Dome ★★★★★Edinburgh writer Isla Cowan’s deceptively powerful solo show begins as an almost affectionate tribute to the city’s Meadows, fittingly just a few minutes down the road from the show’s venue – its yummy Morningside mummies taking their offspring to nursery, its chilled-out yoga groups, its joggers and gaggles of students hunched around disposable barbecues. By the show’s blazing close, however, the Meadows has become a place of violence and trauma, and the play has transformed into a blistering howl of fury and frustration at women’s conflicted role in the Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
"When I was your age, I worked in a corrugated cardboard factory!" is a phrase my father was fond of telling me as a teenager, presumably in an attempt to extol the virtues of a good Presbyterian work ethic.I wonder what he’d have made of his first place of employment as it was this weekend; all 15.5 acres of it covered with bright graffiti and transformed into performance space, dance floors and installations, complete with fully stocked bars and an array of food trucks. "The Paper Factory", as Edinburgh’s Hidden Door Festival have named it, is a former industrial site on the west of the Read more ...
Simon Thompson
There was a neat conjunction of commemorations to this concert, the most obvious one being the fact that that 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich, so it’s completely appropriate the Royal Scottish National Orchestra chose to end its season with a concert of his music. More than that, however, the composer himself heard this very orchestra (then called the Scottish National Orchestra) play his Festive Overture in the Usher Hall in 1962, during one of Lord Harewood’s Edinburgh Festivals. Therefore, there’s a pleasing symmetry to hearing this team playing it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix’s new detective-noir is a somewhat cosmopolitan beast. It’s written and directed by an American, Scott Frank, derived from a novel, Mercy, by the Danish crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, and set in Edinburgh (as well as other flavourful Scottish locations). There are plenty of Scots in the cast too, although it’s the very English Matthew Goode (Downton Abbey, The Crown etc) who takes the lead role of DCI Carl Morck.But Morck not only doesn’t have a very English name, but is far from your ideal English gentleman with a Lady Mary on his arm. The series opens with a brutal incident in Read more ...
Simon Thompson
I was in Germany last week, and nearly every town I went to was advertising a St Matthew or a St John Passion taking place in the week up to Easter. It says something about how deeply engrained Bach’s Passion settings are in German culture that they can muster up so many performances while, in most years, we in Scotland get only one for the whole country.What a one it is, though. The Dunedin Consort are leaders in this repertoire and their acres of experience tell with every well-turned phrase, every carefully shaped cadence, and every dramatically pointed chord that gives life, meaning and Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has had to put up with its fair share of artist cancellations over the last month, and the ensuing games of musical chairs led to the somewhat implausible scenario of this concert, where Richard Egarr, a conductor more closely associated with Bach and Handel, conducted the UK premiere of a work by Peter Eötvös, that darling of the avant-garde.In fairness to Egarr, he did nothing more than what he does with the Baroque music for which he is so renowned: he played it with the clarity, shape and the expression it needed to come alive. Shape, in fact, was critical Read more ...