A Masked Ball – note the English title given by the EIF, even though this is sung in Italian, an indication, I expect, of moves towards further accessibility – has a reputation as Verdi’s masterpiece of chiaroscuro. In none other of Verdi’s mature operas does tragic darkness sit so close to breezy laughter, most obviously at the end of Act 2 when the conspirators who want to kill Riccardo are shocked into laughter instead of murder.Unfortunately, however, half of this memo appears to have gone missing on its way to Adele Thomas, the Co-General Director and CEO of WNO, and also the Read more ...

Theatrical trickster extraordinaire, purveyor of bewilderingly lavish stage illusions to unsuspecting and often jaw-dropped spectators, New York-based magician and theatre maker Geoff Sobelle jumped ship from the Fringe to the International Festival several years back, and his ambitions have grown ever since. Clown Show, however, must be one of his biggest, boldest and most opulent (and also most barbed) creations – it’s not often, for a start, that a show’s stage design (courtesy of Maruti Evans) gets its own astonished applause when the curtain goes up, as it did on opening night.And Read more ...

With its five-hour Angels in America, the International Festival has already hosted one production of epic proportions in Edinburgh this year. At getting on for three and a half hours, Al-Sirah Al-Hilaliyyah almost counts as its second – and there’s no doubting, in any case, its epic subject matter. This is a huge, sprawling Arabic poem from around the 11th century, telling of the political manoeuvrings, the conflicts and the magnificent victories of the Bani Hilal people and their great warrior hero Abu Zeid. It’s been transformed into a stage production by Palestinian company Khashabi Read more ...

Interspersal programmes – or “mind melds”, as I like to call them – can sometimes open up new vistas of listening and sometimes be tokenistic piffle. Happily, Monday morning’s EIF programme from the Gringolts Quartet (pictured below by Tomasz Trzebiatowski) was the first of those, mostly. Their idea was to take the four movements of Schubert’s final string quartet and to intersperse them with three pieces for string quartet by György Kurtág, the objective being, in Ilya Gringolts’ words, to bring Kurtág’s lyricism to the fore. The EIF isn’t doing much to commemorate Kurtág’s centenary Read more ...

There can be few more cultivated ways to spend a morning than with the chamber music of Francis Poulenc. The Gallic wit that’s so evident in his larger scale work is even more prominent in his music for the salon, where an arch smile or a sly wink seems to accompany almost every phrase. The wind soloists of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra understood this well in their Friday recital at the Queen’s Hall (★★★★★), the elegance and wit dialled up even further by the fact that these musicians play with one another all the time and know each other well. That meant that André Cebrián could bring Read more ...

The gag – and it’s about as pitch-black a gag as you could imagine – is there in the title. Three African American guys hang out, shoot the breeze, chew the fat, discussing everything from pretty girls to who the best blues musician is. They bicker, disagree, pass on nuggets of wisdom and even sing an out-of-tune song or two, seemingly just to pass the time. But constantly interrupting their impromptu discussions are tortured, awkward movements, as the three lynched bodies hang together by their necks in deathly silence.Writer and director Zora Howard’s brief but potent show comes to Read more ...

Hi. I’m Steve, creator of the solo show bearing my name on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and I’d like to make something perfectly clear: I’m alive. I’m not dead.I’m nearly certain of that now, though there was a stretch when it became something of an open question. It was confusing. In some ways, it still is.Which is partly why I’m here in Edinburgh performing a one man show with the not especially subtle title Steve Burns: Alive. Over the years I’ve become considerably more confident about the nature of my continued existence. I eat. I sleep. I pay taxes. My knees hurt now for reasons I don Read more ...

It has taken until halfway through this year’s Edinburgh International Festival before we got to the first string quartet in the Queen’s Hall’s chamber music series, but when it came, the venue was packed to the gills. Maybe that’s the Sheku effect. Mr Kanneh-Mason (pictured below) was joining the Kleio Quartet to play one of the central pillars of the chamber music repertoire, Schubert’s String Quintet, so it’s hardly surprising that people came in their droves.  Image And it was worth it. This was the first time Kanneh-Mason had Read more ...

It’s been 35 years since Tony Kushner’s two-play, multi-hour epic gay soap opera-cum-spiritual meditation was first unleashed on the world in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And it’s been 18 years since director Ivo van Hove unveiled his own raw, stripped-back production with what was then Toneelgroep Amsterdam, now Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. It’s tempting, therefore, to see the Edinburgh International Festival’s revival of van Hove’s production as a classic traversal of a classic text, with all the nicely safe distancing and detached appraisal that that double status might invite.That’ Read more ...

Several years ago, after a Queen’s Hall song morning, a fellow reviewer told me it was time we rethought the song recital, and that the old format of someone standing still while singing songs in German to an uncomprehending audience was way past its sell-by date. He should have been at this one, because Beth Taylor and Hamish Brown’s recital managed to turn the conventional song recital into a gripping piece of drama.Much of that, of course, was down to Taylor’s transfixingly unique voice. I’m always surprised that she is described as a mezzo-soprano, because the depth and richness of her Read more ...

This is Nicola Benedetti’s fourth opening concert while she has been in charge of the Edinburgh International Festival, and I suspect it might be the one she’s most proud of. That’s not (only) because it featured All Rise, the jazz symphony written by the superstar jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (who is also Benedetti’s husband), but because it seemed to unite all the things Benedetti has previously striven for in her opening concerts. Like the rest of them, this pushed the envelope beyond the standard western classical canon, combined diverse musical forces, and focused on themes of building Read more ...

There is, let’s be honest, a certain self-congratulatory self-satisfaction among some particularly well-heeled sections of the Edinburgh International Festival audience, event-goers who’ve forked out a fortune to be fed high culture carefully curated for them, and who either reside in some of the city’s most well-off districts or have perhaps travelled hundreds, even thousands of miles for the pleasure.Heck, a group in front of me were even discussing the merits of the city’s various private members’ clubs, and the intricate exclusionary processes for admission, while waiting for their Read more ...