Edinburgh
Christopher Lambton
If you want an image that defines, for this writer at least, the essence of the Edinburgh Festival, it is the sight of Greyfriars Kirk full to capacity at 5.30 pm on a blustery Monday afternoon. At other times of year this sort of event might be hopefully billed as a “rush hour concert”, sparsely attended by commuters en route to the suburbs, but at festival time Edinburgh has a whole new demographic. Fighting its way past the tourists photographing Greyfriars Bobby (pictured below) could be seen an enthusiastic international audience to whom the prospect of an hour-long concert is one sure Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
On paper this was an interesting programme. The Edinburgh Festival traditionally opens with a major choral work, but while the international audience would probably be happy with endlessly recycled requiems and masses, festival directors have often felt obliged to venture into more challenging territory. So for last night’s opening concert the chorus had prominent roles in two separate works on either side of the interval: Scriabin’s Prometheus, The Poem of Fire, and Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien. While there is a superficial resemblance between the hazy tonal landscape occupied by Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Andrew Maxwell (****) tells the Scots in the audience that he’s going to “rip the shit out of everything they hold dear” in Hubble Bubble, his take on the independence referendum. He doesn’t quite do that but it’s a witty and thoughtful take on the issues surrounding the vote.Maxwell points out that the people of the British Islands are about 90 per cent genetically the same – “the rest is just flavourings” – and the show’s title suggests the Irishman finds nationalism a heady, dangerous brew. He says that Northern Ireland may be less than happy to wake up on 19 September to find Read more ...
Peter Eyre
Some years ago I read a piece about a novel of Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew. Bernhard (1931-1989) was perhaps the most famous Austrian writer of his time, but unknown to me. In this article he was described as intense, manically obsessive, addicted to the unvarnished truth, and innovative in his constructions. I read the novel and was hooked. Bernhard’s novels have no paragraphs, and read like the monologues of a man possessed. You almost need to read them in one sitting. I read all his novels available in translation, and rushed to the bookshop every time I heard of a new Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Celia Imrie is admired and loved as a comic actress. Her conversation, just as much as her performances, is full of her trademarks: sudden darting looks, alertness, natural timing, changes of register. They will all be in display in her cabaret show Laughing Matters.Imrie is imprinted on the public consciousness for her TV roles: Miss Babs, the owner of Acorn Antiques (for which she won an Olivier Award when it became a stage musical), Philippa in Dinnerladies; and then there are the films: Una Alconbury in Bridget Jones's Diary, Celia in Calendar Girls (even if the only thing which ever gets Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comics rarely start a show by referencing the ending of a previous one, but Sarah Kendall has first to do a bit of housekeeping to explain the genesis of Touchdown. The payoff for her last show was her dropping the c-bomb on her high-school gym teacher, Coach Harris, but when her mother attended a gig she said to her daughter: “It didn’t quite happen like that, though, did it?”Indeed it didn’t; the punchline was a fabrication for the sake of a good gag, and here Kendall, a London-based Australian, gives the back story in an intricately woven tale about her teenage years. She was a gawky, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The sheer scale of One Direction’s global victory march is something to behold. Last night’s stopover on their Where We Are tour was the biggest concert ever staged by one band on Scottish soil, with 64,000 fans pouring into the national rugby stadium (I didn’t conduct a scientific poll of the gender split, but it had certainly never been easier to use the Gents at Murrayfield.)Everything was bright and brilliant and giddily over-sized, from the piercing screams that greeted every banal utterance (“We love you, Scotland!”), to the price of the merch: £10 for a flimsy plastic lanyard is pretty Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
No quibble about the result. Pianist Martin James Bartlett deservedly became BBC Young Musician of the Year 2014 at Usher Hall in Edinburgh last night. The 17-year-old, a student at the specialist Purcell School in Hertfordshire, and at the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music took the title with a very strong performance of Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. He was watchful, alert to every nuance, playing idiomatically, and with a very convincing sense of the shape of the piece right through to the final pay-off. He also established a lively partnership with the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Josef K: The Only Fun in TownJosef K seem like one that got away. Their fellow Postcard Records’ bands Aztec Camera and Orange Juice had high-profile afterlives with, respectively, the careers of their songwriters and front men Roddy Frame and Edwin Collins. After his band split, Josef K’s Paul Haig went on to have a string of fantastic, accessible releases – including collaborations with New Order – but none clicked with the mainstream. His old outfit’s legacy is though heard less directly through Franz Ferdinand, whose agitated forward-thrust derives directly from Josek K. It’s also Read more ...
David Nice
This is more an excuse for celebration than a review. Six years after the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1974 – the birth year we were marking last night – I rolled up in a foggy Edinburgh one February day and chose it as my alma mater on the strength especially of one concert which showed what musical life in the city might be like: trumpeter John Wilbraham playing Bach and Handel with the SCO under Roderick Brydon. I fell in love with the venue, the Queen’s Hall, as much as the orchestra. In 1982 I proudly took on the role of the SCO’s student publicity officer. It’s a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There will be some who will sneer at this film, but ignore them. Director Dexter Fletcher has fashioned a wonderfully enjoyable movie from a play by Stephen Greenhorn (who also wrote the script), in which a good-natured story about family, love and friendship is set to the music of The Proclaimers.Davy (George MacKay) and Ally (Kevin Guthrie) are lifelong friends, squaddies returning from a tour of Afghanistan in which one of their friends was killed and another seriously injured. But this isn't a film about trauma or loss, as we see the two burst into a song-and-dance routine as they skip Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Not long ago James McAvoy finished a brutal run as Macbeth, and he’s back in Filth as another manic Scotsman hurtling towards self-destruction. The setting is Nineties Edinburgh, and his character, dodgy policeman Bruce Robertson, has a Machiavellian genius for getting one over on his copper colleagues, until his addiction-fuelled luck runs out, and he comes crashing down. He’s the first-person narrator for most of the story, and though repulsively believable, his grip on the narrative starts separating from reality.It’s a compelling performance that pulls out all the stops, and then some, Read more ...