Edinburgh
David Kettle
"Thomas Aikenhead – who the fuck are you?" So goes the refrain to the opening number of I Am Thomas, a boisterous co-production between London’s Told by an Idiot, and the National Theatre of Scotland and Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre north of the border. It’s a good question, one that acknowledges few in the audience will be familiar with the show’s central figure. And also one that raises the issue of why we should even care about some guy we’ve never heard of.So who is the Thomas of the show’s title? He’s the last person to be executed for blasphemy in Britain, in Edinburgh in Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
I expect that there will be a sense of mild disappointment within the ranks of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra that its great Brahms season did not come to quite the conclusion intended. As readers will know from last week’s review of the Fourth Symphony, a herniated disc meant that Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati had to pull out of both that concert and also last night’s performance of the Deutsches Requiem (he has also withdrawn from Glyndebourne performances of Wagner's Die Meistersinger).Principal Guest Conductor Emmanuel Krivine agreed to stand in for both concerts but in the event he Read more ...
David Kettle
Seldom can the suggestion of a post-show discussion have seemed so… well, unappealing is probably the polite way of putting it. Because discussion is precisely what Glasgow-based theatre company Vanishing Point’s devastating new show The Destroyed Room is all about – an hour of middle-class, liberal hand-wringing, of batting issues back and forth, weighing, challenging and rejecting opinions. And of showing up our delight at observing and our eagerness to express views, but also our inability to act on them. And, of course, of never arriving at a solution. Because, director Matthew Lenton is Read more ...
David Kettle
It was to have been the culmination of principal conductor Robin Ticciati’s Brahms symphony cycle with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. But with Ticciati laid up with a herniated disc, we’re told, it fell to the SCO’s principal guest conductor Emmanuel Krivine to step in at the last minute. What Ticciati would have made of the concert, and of the concluding Brahms Fourth, of course, we’ll never know – and it would be churlish to speculate. What Krivine did make of the evening, however, was something really rather remarkable.Remarkable in his passion and energy, his boundless enthusiasm for the Read more ...
David Kettle
Just a few days earlier, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra had been doing a pretty convincing impression of a symphony orchestra in a powerful Vaughan Williams Fifth Symphony under John Storgårds. And here they were, in crisp, nimble Mozart and Beethoven, being a thoroughly convincing period band – well, with valveless horns, at least. They’re nothing if not versatile.But the real joy of their conductorless concert – and joyful it truly was – was its laying bare of the mechanics of music making itself, and in just about every combination made possible by the absence of a conductor. For that, Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
To a freezing grey night in Scotland’s capital, the conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto brought a welcome ray of Mexican sunshine. Wearing a broad grin he marched onto the platform of the Usher Hall and launched into Rodion Shchedrin’s impish Concerto for Orchestra No.1, Naughty Limericks, with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. As its title suggests, this short piece is virtuosic mayhem for a large orchestra: at first hearing it has the swagger and tomfoolery of Gershwin’s An American in Paris but with the admixture of an earthy bawdiness that is totally Russian.Prieto, a tall man, conducts Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven: it’s a while since I have heard the Scottish Chamber Orchestra play such an essentially classical programme on its home turf, the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh. Recent reviews have focused on concerts in the much more capacious Usher Hall, where this intrepid orchestra has pushed at the boundaries of its natural repertoire with an ongoing Brahms cycle and even a Mahler symphony.The difference is striking. It’s not just the numbers - in the Usher Hall a chamber orchestra of about 40 can effortlessly swell to more than 60 - but it is more the contrast of texture and Read more ...
David Kettle
Since its unveiling at London’s Royal Court in 1997, Conor McPherson’s The Weir has become something of a modern classic, notching up dozens of productions worldwide and even winning inclusion in the National Theatre’s list of the 100 most significant plays of the 20th century. It’s also a deceptively simple, unassuming offering – on the face of it, not much even seems to happen. There are no theatrical pyrotechnics, just a few spooky stories told by locals to an intriguing newcomer in a rural Irish pub. So there’s a weight of expectation on any new staging, and also a curiosity as to what Read more ...
David Kettle
It was a simple yet beautifully elegant way for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to kick off its 2016 chamber concerts: a recital for flute, viola and harp, with Debussy’s beguiling Sonata as the centrepiece, and other contrasting music for the same trio orbiting around it.And it was a similarly sensible decision for the orchestra to spotlight two of its principal players – flautist Alison Mitchell (pictured below) and violist Jane Atkins (main picture) – who joined together in what felt like an entirely unforced, natural partnership, both equally supple in phrasing and tonal variety, alive to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“Finding the Light”, the second episode of this four-part series, took us to the period when Scottish intellectuals led the world in innovative and revolutionary thinking, Edinburgh’s neo-classical architecture in the leafy streets of the New Town made for new standards of civic architecture, and Scottish education could be of the highest quality.The exceptionally enthusiastic narrator is the Scottish representational artist Lachlan Goudie, who rather disarmingly sketches as he goes, particularly in the city and galleries of Rome where Scots of the Enlightenment went for even further Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
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 of the question. On the other hand, there's a Nutcracker-like family audience at the ready for pretty productions which skim lightly over the whole neglect and cruelty thing – but that leaves you with a story so bland that even Disney had to invent singing mice to perk it up.Big international choreographers tend to go for more acidity, but with Read more ...
David Kettle
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 transverse strip of stage.Designer Kai Fischer’s rethink of the Traverse interior makes the Edinburgh theatre’s Christmas show immediately feel special. And although dividing the audience to both sides of the action doesn’t ultimately serve much of a dramatic purpose, it neatly reflects the twoness at the heart of the brand new show: two Scottish Read more ...