Edinburgh
David Kettle
There’s been an incident in Edinburgh. Right near the Scottish Parliament. Several dead, many more injured. Among the witnesses were two of the capital’s young football stars, now clearly traumatised by what they’ve seen. Someone shouting about women running the world, inflicting their agenda on powerless men. Something needs to happen – these people should be hunted down, made to pay for what they’ve done.The questions are there right from the startling opening of this slippery new show aiming to dissect Incel culture from a consortium of Scottish theatre companies – Civic Digits, Stellar Read more ...
David Kettle
Evil walks among us. But it doesn’t arrive courtesy of mad scientists, bubbling potions and horrifying transformations. Instead, it comes from ordinary people surrendering themselves to their basest desires and resentments. Even worse, doing that feels… good.Anyone expecting jump scares and hideous, barely human creatures from Jekyll and Hyde at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre – boiled down from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella into an intense 70-minute solo show by Scottish writer and performer Gary McNair – might be disappointed, at least partially. Indeed, there’s quite a bit about McNair’s Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Violinist Jonas Ilias-Kadesha was placed front and centre of the publicity for this concert. This is his first season concert with the SCO, though back in 2019 he stood in for an indisposed soloist at short notice for one of their European tours. Inviting him back is a vote of confidence, so I was looking forward to hearing him as soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Ravel’s Tzigane.His Mozart turned out to be a very mixed bag, however. It began well, with clipped, precise playing from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the opening tutti, and an improvisatory opening flourish from Read more ...
David Kettle
You can keep your Cinderellas, your Aladdins, your wannabe Lord Mayors of London. The way forward with Christmas shows is clearly women’s football – more specifically, a Scottish five-a-side team that competes in the Homeless World Cup.You’ve got to hand it to Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre for the sheer audacity of presenting such a shamelessly un-Christmassy show as its… er… Christmas show. In fact, there’s plenty about Same Team – its sometimes distressing details of abuse, neglect and deprivation, for example, but also its gloriously rich lexicon of profanities – that makes is decidedly Read more ...
David Nice
On an Edinburgh afternoon of torrential rain close to the winter solstice, what ecstasy to be transported to an ancient Greek midsummer day, a Claude landscape with shepherds calling across the hills, painted in the most translucent colours by Richard Strauss in his late mastery. All it needs are world-class voices and an orchestra that glows; it got both in Scottish Opera’s concert staging. From photos taken at earlier performances in Glasgow and the Lammermuir Festival back in September, the worry was that director Emma Jenkins’ thoughts would tend too much to the troubled 1930s in Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Nobody would describe Felix Mendelssohn as a fringe composer, but his piano concertos aren’t exactly central classical repertoire either. They lack the foundational status of Mozart’s and the high Romantic seriousness of Beethoven’s or Brahms’, and Mendelssohn doesn’t help himself in the way that an air of the faintly hilarious hangs around his First Piano Concerto.It’s often so hyperactive that it’s impossible to take it seriously, with an almost comically energetic first movement that feels like a greyhound straining at the trap, and a finale so light-hearted that it’s almost a self-parody. Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Chameleon among orchestras, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra hung up its habitual classical cloak in favour of an evening of 20th and 21st century minimalism, curated, presented, and conducted by the star percussionist Colin Currie.That this was a different sort of concert was obvious from the outset; before the concert, DJ Dolphin Boy was installed in the Queen's Hall foyer (pictured below), filling the surrounding spaces with rich ambient noise. On a freezing cold Edinburgh night the long bar was a haven of warmth, jostling with heavy coats, pints and cocktails. More of a party than a concert Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Fresh from winning this year’s Scottish Album of the Year Award – for the third time no less! – Young Fathers gave a spectacular performance on Tuesday night on their home turf, at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. Sure, it seems odd that a competition that’s only been running ten years has been won three times by a band who’ve released four albums.Listen to the albums though and you’ll get it. See Young Fathers live and you’ll realise why this is one of the most exciting bands making music right now not just in Scotland, nor even the UK, but internationally. This is a group who are always creating Read more ...
David Kettle
You can almost feel the energy blazing off the stage in this fast, furious and fiercely funny two-hander from writer Racheal Ofori and Newcastle-based Alphabetti Theatre. Don’t blink or you’ll miss a crucial plot twist, or a nifty swerve into new characters, or even a major technological development.But behind all the japes, attitude and theatrical playfulness, there are broader, more human issues being explored here. Carleen and Crystal are urban 20-somethings who’ve done well with their amusing musings for online consumption via a platform that feels very much like YouTube ("Questions I Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
As any good choral singer knows, you can’t deliver too emphatic a “k” for the opening Kyrie Eleison of any one of thousands of Mass settings. Well, almost. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus produced such a distinct, detached, and powerful opening consonant for this performance of Bach’s B minor Mass that it seemed to bounce several times round the auditorium before being enveloped by the great tide of chromaticism that characterises this magisterial movement.As the Kyrie developed, the consonants retreated somewhat to a more conventional audibility, but the opening served to remind us Read more ...
Gary Naylor
I know, I was there. Well, not in Edinburgh in 1985, but in Liverpool in 1981, and the pull of London and the push from home, was just as strong for me back then as it is for Eck in John McKay’s comedy Dead Dad Dog. Back in London for the first time in 35 years, it plays now not as contemporary satirical commentary on Thatcher's Britain, but as warm nostalgia-fest, inevitably its teeth blunted, its references, Morrissey excepted, cuddlier. That softening comes, at least in part, from a quick survey of the house people of a certain age. To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim from Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Songs of Wars I Have Seen is an hour-long through=composed work by contemporary German composer Heiner Goebbels which combines the music of 17th century composer Matthew Locke, the text from the wartime diaries of American Jewish writer Gertude Stein and Goebbels’s own ingenious musical and dramatic ideas.First commissioned by the Southbank Centre and premiered in 2007, the work in this Scottish outing is a collaboration between the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Baroque ensemble Dunedin Consort, with players from both on stage. The composer’s direction is that women are at the front Read more ...