Edinburgh
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 ...
Miranda Heggie
What a delight to see an almost full Queen’s Hall for a programme solely of contemporary music. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s New Dimensions series, launched this season, sees a host of newer classical works performed and appears to be drawing in regular audience members as well as a younger crowd.Opening with James MacMillan’s Tryst, the orchestra wove together the sometimes angular strands of the music with concise conducting from principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. They were then joined by trumpet soloist Sergei Nakariakov for Jorg Widmann’s invigorating trumpet concerto Ad Absurdum Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Philharmonia’s residency was the centrepiece of the Edinburgh International Festival’s final weekend, and it’s right that the orchestra should be the focus because they were consistently the finest thing about both their Verdi Requiem and their concert performance of Richard Strauss’ last opera Capriccio.First to Verdi. Not only was the playing rich and majestic, but there was terrific clarity, too, and I was repeatedly struck by how pristine the details were. I don’t think I’ve ever previously noticed the role of the piccolo, for example, and the quintet of horns made themselves Read more ...
David Kettle
L’Addition, Summerhall ★★★★ Bert and Nasi – or, more fully, writers/directors/actors Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas – are virtually Fringe royalty, having carved out a niche in recent years with playful, provocative shows that question theatrical conventions alongside often serious real-world topics (the Syrian conflict in 2017’s Palmyra, for example, or the EU and Brexit in 2016’s Eurohouse). This year they’ve almost transformed themselves into a meta-theatrical Morecambe and Wise, however, for a show (first seen at last year’s Avignon Festival) created with Tim Etchells, Read more ...
David Kettle
REVENGE: After the Levoyah, Summerhall ★★★★★ The Jews have had enough. After decades – centuries, in fact – of suspicion, name-calling, finger-pointing and violent persecution, they can’t even leave their Gants Hill or Barkingside flats, where London smears into Essex, any more. In 2019, though, things have really come to a head thanks to one figure: Jeremy Corbyn. Something needs to be done.Step in twins Dan and Lauren, plus dodgy ex-gangster Malcolm Spivak, who steals the show with his wide-boy pronouncements at their granddad’s funeral. Have the unlikely siblings got the balls to act Read more ...
David Kettle
Òran, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ Glasgow-based theatre company Wonder Fools are having a particularly busy Fringe. Alongside a revival of their excellent football drama Same Team at the Traverse Theatre, their far smaller, more intimate show Òran has company co-artistic director Robbie Gordon deliver a blistering solo performance inside a shipping container at the back of the Pleasance Courtyard. It’s far better than that probably sounds.And while Òran might open with smiles and camaraderie – with audience members greeted and assigned micro-roles, for example – things quickly get far Read more ...
David Kettle
Ni Mi Madre, Pleasance Dome ★★★★ Philip Larkin offered a famously pithy assessment of parents’ impact on their offspring’s future lives. It’s one that Brazilian/Ecuadorian/Italian/Dominican writer and performer Arturo Luíz Soria would no doubt sympathise with – at least partly – in the solo show he’s built around memories of his mother. In fact, Ni Mi Madre is very much the older woman’s show: Soria transforms himself into Bete, the larger-than-life diva, harridan and force of nature who raised him, taking us through her three husbands and countless kids, her extravagant neediness and Read more ...
David Kettle
Bellringers, Roundabout @ Summerhall ★★★★ Dystopian climate-crisis dramas seemed ten-a-penny at the Fringe a few years back, but they’re far thinner on the ground in 2024. Which makes this deliciously elusive, oblique debut drama from Daisy Hall all the more intriguing, and valued.Clement and Aspinall appear in monk-like cassocks in a church belfry, apparently summoned by a fast-approaching storm. It’s their job to ring the tower’s bells, perhaps to alert residents of their Oxfordshire village to the impending deluge, or even act as some kind of community-protecting talisman simply by Read more ...
Simon Thompson
When you stop to think about it, Schwanengesang is a pretty ridiculous thing. Schubert’s final song cycle was famously put together by his publishers after his death, and so it’s barely a cycle at all. Therefore, unlike Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, there’s no story and, even worse, the lurches in mood between the songs are so extreme that they can become absurd.I reflected on that several times while watching Ian Bostridge singing it during this EIF Queen’s Hall recital, because his identification with the songs and their meaning seemed so complete that he could drag the audience into Read more ...
David Kettle
The Sound Inside, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★ Adam Rapp’s unapologetically intricate, bookish two-hander arrives for its UK premiere at the Traverse Theatre following a successful run in New York, including no fewer than six Tony nominations. It’s not a new work, then, but its themes and its gloriously, unashamedly erudite writing make it one of the strongest offerings in the Traverse’s Fringe programme.Not for nothing do literary references ricochet back and forth across Rapp’s Ivy League thriller-cum-love story. Bella Baird is a Yale professor of creative writing, and she discovers a Read more ...
David Kettle
In Two Minds, Traverse Theatre ★★★★ Mother is finally getting her kitchen extension. It’s a lot of work, though, and it’ll take several weeks. So she’ll have to move in – temporarily – with her Daughter, in her city studio flat, while the work takes place. The relocation is smooth and straightforward, however – well, kind of, until Mother returns to her obsessive praying, and even cancels the building work itself when she gets furious at how long it’s taking.Joanne Ryan’s increasingly tense but ultimately moving two-hander from Dublin’s Fishamble theatre company might have a dramatically Read more ...