Kicking off the final leg of Icelandic rock giants Sigur Rós’s world tour, the Edinburgh Playhouse had been sold out months in advance for what promised to be an epic concert. Touring their album Átta, the band were joined by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and its chorus’s female voices. The concept of the tour Is brilliant; a different local orchestra joins them in each country, which (apart from saving on touring fees and emissions) will presumably draw in an audience from the orchestra’s concert-goers as well as die-hard fans of the band.
The stage was indeed quite a spectacle. Members of the orchestra were individually lit, with the band up front, all under the baton of British conductor Robert Ames, who’s co-director and co-principal conductor of the London Contemporary Orchestra – the original orchestra to collaborate with Sigur Ros at the start of the tour back in 2023. Ames’s sweeping hand gestures commanded swathes of colour from the strings as the lightbulbs on stage individually pulsed and glowed, but the performance swiftly began to feel like style had been valued above substance. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra were of course fantastic, but the instrumental writing – whilst harmonically pleasant - wasn’t nearly complex enough to merit an orchestra of this calibre. The lighting, too, was a bit tame. For a theatre like the Edinburgh Playhouse there was so much more which could have been done with the lighting, which felt like a curiously safe artistic choice. Singer and guitarist Jónsi Birgisson’s vocals had his signature ethereal tone, but he sounded a little vocally tired, and his bowed guitar playing got lost in the mix and didn’t add anything to the overall sound.
The band’s bassist Georg Holm has, aptly, described the album as "introverted". Whilst there is no harm in creating an introverted piece of art, hiring a theatre and a full orchestra and taking it on a world tour feels a bit contradictory. I am likely in a minority though, since the rest of the sold out audience was rapt, with a standing ovation at the end from almost every member. Though I personally may revert to seeing orchestral performances in a concert hall, being part of such a large group of people connecting with live music will always be a wonderful thing.
