Edinburgh
David Kettle
Edinburgh audiences can, it has to be said, be frustratingly unadventurous. Which no doubt accounts for the relatively light turnout for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s quietly fizzing Queen’s Hall concert under conductor Oliver Knussen, three quarters of whose music was written after 1945. What any absentees missed, however, was a gloriously passionate evening of crisp, energetic music making. And also one that showcased the versatility of the SCO as far more than a band that just plays Mozart and Haydn, but a very persuasive contemporary music outfit too. Even if it all ended a bit Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s not the first time that young French conductor Alexandre Bloch has been in front of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – he took them on a well-received short Scottish tour last summer. But it was his first main-season gig with the band, and he certainly had something to say. "A bit of French and Russian atmosphere," was how he modestly described his concert in the concert progamme’s intro: it was certainly that, but plenty more besides.As shown in his opener, Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks, one of the pieces he’d toured with the SCO last summer, and which the players clearly knew inside out. Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
For the gentleman next to me in the Festival Theatre, this was his second outing to see Rusalka. At the production premiere earlier this month in Glasgow, he had been “blown away” by Dvořák's lyric masterpiece. Given half a chance, I would go back to Edinburgh for the second and last performance in this run; not only because this is a brilliant, beautifully judged performance, but also because the opportunity might never come again. Rusalka was last staged in Scotland by a Czech company in 1964. Will we really have to wait until the 2060s to see another?The neglect of Rusalka is puzzling. Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
“Bon soir, good evening! Nice to see you! To see you...” Four years after bidding an emotional farewell to the Usher Hall, the Gallic charmer is back, maybe slightly stouter, with a tinge of grey in a new beard, the great mop of curly red hair as unruly as ever. And that accent! As the anecdotes flow, stout middle-aged Edinburgers swoon as they imagine themselves drinking pastis on the Boulevard St Germain in the spring sunshine.Stéphane Denève was music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra for seven years, during which time he fell in love with Scotland and Scotland fell in love Read more ...
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 ...