Scotland
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
Joseph Bullman's first series – about six London streets – won several awards, and deservedly so. Now he has turned his attention to Scotland in a three-parter starting in Edinburgh's Moray Place, and last night's opener was another beautifully judged mix of architectural history and social comment.Moray Place, Scotland's most expensive, and therefore poshest, street (and far removed from the area of Sunshine on Leith), is part of the Moray estate, designed by the 10th Earl of Moray. The Earl saw a chance to make a killing in early 19th-century Edinburgh, when the medieval Old Town – where Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What is an opening ceremony for? For the taste gendarmerie on Twitter, it’s a juicy chance to fall on the festivities like a pack of wolves and tear the thing to shreds. For homegrown celebrities now domiciled far from the host country, it’s a chance to reaffirm vows of patriotism in public. For everyone else, it’s a party attended by some ridiculously beautiful athletes, plus the codgers of the bowls team.Bombastic? Certainly. Bloated? For sure. Tacky? Hell yes. Any ceremony featuring John Barrowman and Susan Boyle is hardly calculated to score maximum points for artistic impression. Even Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Before the Vikings came to Britain there was no whaling, though coastal-dwellers would avail themselves of any beached strays by chopping them up for their meat and oil. It was the bellicose Norsemen who imported the notion of actively pursuing the creatures, which is how the pilot whale hunt became a tradition in Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides. A line of boats would drive the whales into the shallows, where they were slaughtered by the islanders.It was the shape of all manner of hideous things to come, and it wasn't easy to sit through this first part of Adam Nicolson's history of whaling Read more ...
Andy Plaice
Crime drama at its best not only offers a satisfying mystery and characters with whom we want to spend time, but a strong sense of place, a location that captures our imagination and makes us want to know more. Little wonder then that the BBC snapped up the rights to Ann Cleeves’s Shetland Quartet of novels featuring Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, the Scottish cop with the Spanish ancestor. With its authentic Shetland locations, Raven Black (the first of three two-part stories) was beautiful to look at.It's the middle of summer and nobody can sleep. It's making the locals crazyFrom the Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
“Would we be able to prosecute the Vikings today, should we? I mean are there parallels between what the Nazis did by plundering art and gold, or what the German soldiers did who raped Norwegian women when they occupied Norway?” Silke Roeploeg might perhaps fit the Viking caricature: tall, blonde, physically fit, ruddy weathered cheeks, and smart. She is however German, and a lecturer on the Highland and Islands Nordic studies, which includes a component on Vikings. Now living on Shetland, Silke is philosophical about the controversy that the Vikings are still managing to cause, some 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 ...
David Nice
Baleful prophecies were rife before the concert. Was Vladimir Jurowski right to let Mahler’s only total tragedy among his symphonies, the Sixth, share the programme with anything else, least of all a new viola concerto in which the solo instrument’s naturally pale cast of thought seemed likely to be indulged by James MacMillan – another composer not afraid of rhetorical angst?As it turned out, the concerto had as much of the healthily extrovert about it as MacMillan’s immediate predecessors in the form for oboe and violin, while Jurowski’s Mahler wasn’t, it seemed, out to blitz us after all. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Chisholm was born and raised in Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, and was tutored by great fiddler player, composer and instrument maker Donald Riddell. He's a regular player with Julie Fowlis and with his own band Wolfstone, and this is a live recording of his epic Strathglass Trilogy. Originally released on the Copperfish label, the trilogy was six years in the making, and features the award-winning Farrar (2008), Canaich (2010) and Affric (2012). The trilogy - and this live set - is a musical representation of the ancient Chisholm Clan lands north-west of Loch Ness. It’s one of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Andrew Maxwell premiered Banana Kingdom at the Edinburgh Fringe earlier this year, its title made a lot more sense. The show was a coruscating examination of what Scotland might be if the independence vote next September goes Alex Salmond's way; a tiny nation trying to go it alone at a time when the rest of Europe wants to be an even bigger - and of course happier - family.At the start of his run at the Soho Theatre, however, the Irishman tells us he has reworked the show, jettisoning much of the Scottish content because he felt it wasn't relevant to London audiences. I rather think he's Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The debates that come with music awards tend to be more interesting than the institutions themselves, which is why it was so novel to see this year’s SAY Award - the Creative Scotland-backed equivalent of the Mercury Prize - go to a work that was not only innovative but genuinely loved. Though it must have been tempting for RM Hubbert to take some time out and blow the prize money on a Porsche, the Glasgow guitarist - a 20-year veteran of the local music scene - announced his next album two weeks later.Breaks & Bone is the final part of what Hubbert has termed “the ampersand trilogy”, a 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 ...