Scotland
Marina Vaizey
Got Soul! Honeybelles! Mums in Durham! Three shortlisted finalists from the north and Scotland. Along the way we – and Gareth Malone – were sung to by the Mancunian Rhythm of Life, not to mention Too Many Cooks in Inverness, and a septuagenarian all-male group from Malton kept in order by a retired schoolmistress, who had evolved into a disciplined conductor – and had a fit of the giggles when faced with Mr Malone.Hundreds of choirs involving thousands of people applied to be considered by the choirmaster of the nation for the Best in Britain. Our Gareth is subject in the programme to scores Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Two personable musicians, who win on all fronts: at the pinnacle of their highly competitive and skilled professions, highly articulate, and perhaps unlikely partners in their art. In one corner, ladies and gentlemen, the composer, world-leading jazz trumpeter, teacher, head of Lincoln Center Jazz, the New Orleans-born Wynton Marsalis, 55. In the other, Nicola Benedetti, 29, the Scottish classical violinist, teacher and leading campaigning proselytiser for the importance of music in all spheres.Miss Benedetti played the premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto in D, with a mere 100 Read more ...
David Nice
No living composer writes more compellingly for choir or for strings than James MacMillan (a surprisingly accepted "Sir" is now an optional addition to the name). This beautifully planned programme's first half gave us the former, a cappella choral music at its most masterly in the setting of the Miserere premiered by The Sixteen in 2009, before Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis lay down the gauntlet for the latter. Both were matched - though it would be hard to surpass them - in the world premiere of a masterpiece combining the two forces, MacMillan's Stabat Mater.Post- Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s not often you need a passport to get into a theatre show. But then the journey required to get to Scottish site-specific experts Grid Iron’s Crude does feel like something of a pilgrimage – first get yourself to Dundee, then find the Science Centre car park, and hop on a coach to transport you deep into the restricted, ID-required heart of the city’s port.To an immense industrial hangar, modestly named Shed 36, a mere corner of which has been transformed into a multi-level stage for Crude, Grid Iron’s masterful exploration of the seductive, destructive power of oil. The Edinburgh-based Read more ...
David Nice
His transformational Brahms series with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra may have been truncated by slipped disc troubles - he was much missed at Glyndebourne too - but Robin Ticciati is back with renewed energy and purpose. To judge from the brilliant but focused party they seemed to be having with Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony last night, the players are as overjoyed as he is.There was much to celebrate just in the evening alone: the last symphony came as the cathartic third act of an opera for orchestra which had led us from the majestic 39th into the woods of the radical 40th and out into the Read more ...
David Kettle
Fleeing rape and forced marriage in their war-torn homeland, a boatload of women refugees washes up in Greece, where they beg asylum from the suspicious locals. No, not a depressingly familiar news story of our own times, but the basis of Aeschylus’s 2,500-year-old drama The Suppliant Women – an ancient work whose unmistakable contemporary resonances David Greig brings unashamedly to the fore in his brand new adaptation.His first production at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre since taking the reins as its artistic director this season, The Suppliant Women also marks Greig’s second collaboration Read more ...
David Kettle
One of two Danish Thomases at the head of BBC bands (compatriot Thomas Søndergård is at the helm of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales), Thomas Dausgaard joins the Glasgow-based BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as chief conductor this season.Dausgaard follows in the rather illustrious footsteps of Donald Runnicles (who becomes the Orchestra's conductor emeritus), and joins a high-flying team of Ilan Volkov as principal guest and composer-conductor Matthias Pintscher as artist-in-association.Runnicles has left, as they say, big shoes to fill. But Dausgaard is out to make his mark with a Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s just a short trip down the A1 from Edinburgh. But East Lothian – with its big skies, wide-open spaces, empty beaches and seemingly inexhaustable supply of quaint, historic villages – feels like a long, long way from the Scottish capital. Especially from the heaving, hectic Edinburgh of the August festivals season – which East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival follows by just a couple of weeks, managing to maintain the momentum of artistic endeavour, but also providing a far more reflective, considered antidote.The East Lothian festival takes its name from the surprisingly wild Lammermuir Read more ...
David Kettle
A single, lonely star might seem harsh for what is first-time director (and writer, and lead) Talulah Riley’s woeful debut feature. And it’s true that, if nothing else, the St Trinian’s franchise star packs a lot into her Scottish Mussel.Like an unconvincing storyline bringing together jokey, blokey Glasgow petty criminals, Highland hippy eco-warriors and an unlikely couple of mismatched lovers. And a cast of dozens, including fleeting cameos (usually gratuitous) from Harry Enfield, James Dreyfus, Russell Kane, Rufus Hound and more. And, of course, a trip back in time to the Scotland of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Johnny Lynch – the artist otherwise known as Pictish Trail – is one of the country’s most intriguing musicians. In 2010, he upped sticks and moved into a caravan on the remote island of Eigg, ensuring every appraisal of his work evermore would refer to him as a “hermit” or a “recluse”. And yet, despite the geographical challenges, Lynch somehow remains the life and soul of any party he cares to put his name to: festival curator (they come to him); label boss (releasing music into the world on the back of postcards, with coordinates rather than catalogue numbers); purveyor of the finest space- Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
“One of us is crying/ One of us is lying/ In her lonely bed/ Staring at the ceiling/ Wishing she was somewhere else instead…” Poor Juliet Stevenson must have wondered how she’d ended up like the girl in the Abba song – waiting for a call from her agent to apologise for getting her into this mess. It’s not Juliet’s fault. It’s the silly script.One of Us began last week on a dark and stormy night when a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds (but on recreational drugs) butchered a pair of newly-weds before car-jacking a Lexus and driving to a lonely Scottish glen where both sets of in-laws lived. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While there will, if there is any justice, be plenty written about King Creosote’s Astronaut Meets Appleman, few will probably state what to me is obvious: this is a really, really sexy record. Now, being Scottish, I’m perhaps predisposed to believe that about anything that features what I can only describe as techno bagpipes - but I defy you to listen, really listen, to the sprawling seven-minute album opener “You Just Want” and not feel at least a little shiver. There’s a creak, a craving, to Kenny Anderson’s always expressive vocals, “can I be him?” almost the only variation on a droning Read more ...