Edinburgh
Cinderella, Scottish Ballet, Edinburgh Festival TheatreThursday, 07 January 2016
When producing Cinderella, the main question is: sweet or sour? That Prokofiev score is splendid, but it's no walk in a candy shop; in Act I the stepsisters have passages so scraping, spiky and dissonant that sugar-coating would seem to be out... Read more... |
Tracks of the Winter Bear, Traverse Theatre, EdinburghSaturday, 12 December 2015
The first surprise in the Traverse Theatre’s seasonal production comes on entering the theatre – being led backstage, then onto what’s normally the performing area, and finally to two ranks of audience seating either side of a gently undulating... Read more... |
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Royal Lyceum Theatre, EdinburghTuesday, 01 December 2015
Christmas has kicked off early in the Scottish capital’s theatreland, with traditional panto Snow White over at the King’s Theatre, and the Lyceum’s high-class offering – as befits the theatre’s 50th anniversary year – in the form of The Lion, the... Read more... |
MacMillan's Since it was the day of preparation..., EdinburghSaturday, 28 November 2015
James MacMillan’s sacred drama Since it was the day of preparation… got its first outing at the Edinburgh International Festival back in 2012. But it was an entirely different experience hearing it in a cavernous Edinburgh cathedral on a chilly... Read more... |
Escaich, RSNO, Märkl, Usher Hall, EdinburghSunday, 22 November 2015
It does not seem like 12 years since the organ in the Usher Hall was restored to full working order. That may be because, in the minds of many Edinburghers, the recent years of untroubled service are still eclipsed by the many decades in which... Read more... |
SCO, Ticciati, Usher Hall, EdinburghFriday, 16 October 2015
The justification for playing Brahms with a chamber orchestra is well rehearsed. In fact, I have on my desk a Telarc boxed set of the four symphonies “in the style of the original Meiningen performances”, recorded by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra... Read more... |
Sam Simmons, Soho TheatreMonday, 28 September 2015
Sam Simmons' new show – for which he won the Edinburgh Comedy Award last month and the Barry award at Melbourne earlier this year – is titled Spaghetti for Breakfast, but could easily be called “Things That Shit Me”; the phrase pops up... Read more... |
Ehnes, BBCSSO, Runnicles, Usher Hall, EdinburghMonday, 28 September 2015
Performances of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony are rare, at least in Scotland. The programme note for this series of concerts by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra records that the orchestra’s only previous performance was in 1978. Those I spoke to in the... Read more... |
Waiting for Godot, Royal Lyceum Theatre, EdinburghThursday, 24 September 2015
It’s been a turbulent few months for Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, with a substantial cut in funding from Creative Scotland last October, followed by the (unrelated) announcement that Mark Thomson, artistic director since 2003, would step down at the... Read more... |
Murmel Murmel, King's Theatre, EdinburghMonday, 31 August 2015
It felt a bit like we were seeing things. At the fag-end of Edinburgh’s 2015 August of festival mayhem, with extreme exhaustion and input overload mixing to brain-addling effect in the heads of most festival-goers and participants, a hallucinatory,... Read more... |
Missa Solemnis, SCO, Ticciati, Usher Hall, EdinburghSunday, 30 August 2015
This was a performance laden with contradictions. After last weekend’s gargantuan Grande Messe des Morts, the standard issue Edinburgh Festival Chorus seemed much smaller – but not really small enough. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra was in its... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2015: Kieran Hodgson/ Richard Gadd/ Trygve WakenshawSaturday, 29 August 2015
Kieran Hodgson, Voodoo Rooms ★★★★When Kieran Hodgson was growing up in West Yorkshire in the early years of the century, he was obsessed with two things – cycling and Lance Armstrong, then the greatest cyclist the world had ever seen.In 2003,... Read more... |
