Edinburgh
Simon Thompson
Peter Whelan is best known to Scottish audiences from his years of service as principal bassoon in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He left to pursue other projects several years ago, the most illustrious of which has probably been his work with the Irish Baroque Orchestra and his own Ensemble Marsyas, both of which demonstrate his interest in and flair for the music of the Baroque and Classical periods.He returned to the SCO on Thursday night, but on the podium rather than in the band, and his expertise in period performance lit up a really exciting performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 102. It Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
“What a lovely sound that was!” declared Music Director Thomas Søndergård, bounding onto the podium of the Usher Hall. He was referring, of course, to the warm applause greeting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra on its first full outing in front of an Edinburgh audience in nigh on 18 months. Readers in England might be faintly surprised that many weeks after a largely unmasked Prom season in London, Scottish audiences are only now creeping back into their familiar spaces, and in the case of the Usher, masks are still compulsory, with conspicuous social distancing reducing the capacity of Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This concert almost had me in tears before a single note was played because it marked (joy!) the first classical concert to take place in the Usher Hall since it was shut in March 2020. She has been closed for eighteen long months, but she hasn’t aged a day.The final piece of music I heard in the Usher Hall before lockdown was Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, so there’s a pleasing symmetry to the fact that it’s also the first I heard when it reopened. And it’s played here by a crack musical team, one that is still glowing from its magnificent Mozart at this summer’s Proms. That concert, Read more ...
Douglas McDonald
This lively interpretation of Richard Strauss’s opera within an opera provides a feast for the senses as a musical highlight of the Edinburgh international Festival. As with the rest of the festival’s 2021 programme, the opera is performed outdoors, in a hangar designed to protect the audience from the Scottish elements and to allow for social distancing.While the venue has proven challenging for some concert performances, it feels appropriate for the setting of Ariadne auf Naxos.The two-hour show is an excellent choice for a slightly chilly evening, as Strauss delights in revealing the Read more ...
David Kettle
The popcorn on offer as you enter the Pleasance’s performing space at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre quickly fills the air with its rich, sugary scent. It’s a smell that sets the scene nicely for a show set in a cinema, but also an aroma that takes on increasingly heavy, cloying, sickly – and inescapable – connotations as Screen 9 progresses.Twelve people were killed and 70 injured in July 2012 at a mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, at the midnight premiere of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises. For its debut production, London-based Piccolo Theatre has devised a verbatim Read more ...
David Kettle
Ageing Mick wakes up on Portobello beach with two gold rings in his pocket, and embarks on the bender to end all benders in order to work out what or who they’re for. Young Gilly has a poorly pug named Mr Immanuel Kant, but can’t face having it put down. Gaynor has suffered from fibromyalgia for decades, but must put it aside if she’s to see her newborn granddaughter. Dougie and Ciara are preparing for their life-changing arrival with one last hedonistic night on the dance floor.On the face of it, Frances Poet seems to be following a well-worn path as the five Edinburgh lives in her quietly Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
The Edinburgh International Festival has returned this year, with a programme of socially distanced events held almost completely outdoors. Yup, that’s right. Outdoors. In Scotland. (Top tip: if you’re going to one of the 8pm concerts, wear a winter coat. It gets somewhat chilly when the sun goes down.) The purpose-built structures which house EIF’s classical music programme are actually pretty robust, and the venue for the larger-scale classical concerts – the grounds of Edinburgh Academy Junior School – is just within walking distance of the city centre, but far enough from busy roads that Read more ...
David Kettle
Fear of Roses Assembly Roxy ★★★One of the more disconcerting aspects to this year’s Fringe is different venues’ contrasting reactions to the easing of Covid restrictions. Some – like Army @ The Fringe and the Traverse Theatre – maintain limited audience numbers and careful distancing, as well as insisting on mask wearing. The Stand at the Corn Exchange even requires a negative lateral flow test for entry. Others, like Assembly, have performing spaces packed with audience members sitting shoulder to shoulder, and mask wearing apparently voluntary (though there are bars within the Read more ...
David Kettle
There’s always a tricky balance to be struck with site-specific theatre. What’s more important: the show itself, or its unusual setting? And to what extent does its location enrich or even impact on the essence of the text? Edinburgh-based site-specific specialists Grid Iron have been staging shows in parks, pubs and plenty of other unconventional settings for decades. Doppler, however, must surely rank as one of their simplest and most effective marriages of content and location.Doppler is a husband and father, and he lives alone in a forest near Oslo. He’s not sure why: it’s something Read more ...
David Kettle
Tunnels Army @ The Fringe ★★★ As has already been noted, it’s a funny old Fringe this year: only a fraction of its normal size; with audiences that seem either Covid-wary or disconcertingly enthusiastic; with some venues taking advantage of restriction relaxations to open up to jam-packed houses (and infuriating many who’d booked on the basis of social distancing), and others maintaining Covid measures, with outdoor performing spaces and careful hygiene. In short, it’s a bit of a mess, but hey, isn’t that in the spirit of the Fringe? If anything, the smaller programmes in what Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Scottish singer-songwriter Dorothy Allison pretty much defines cool. Her band One Dove was the first to snare Andrew Weatherall as producer after his success with Screamadelica, and together they created Morning Dove White: an extraordinary album that fused country and western melancholy with deep dub and electronica. It brought extraordinarily grown up emotion to the rave generation and creating the archetypal comedown soundtrack to the devoted few who loved it.Since then she’s worked with everyone from Massive Attack to Paul Weller, Death In Vegas to Pete Doherty (he used to be talented and Read more ...
Graham Rickson
That a film has a cult following doesn’t mean it’s a masterpiece, and 1985’s Restless Natives is sweet but ephemeral, a Scottish crime caper that can’t hold a candle to Bill Forsyth’s sparky debut, That Sinking Feeling. Both are set in a period when Scotland’s industrial base was being dismantled, and you could place both films in the same part of the cultural Venn diagram which contains the TV programmes Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Boys From the Blackstuff, the latter’s Bernard Hill having a role here as one protagonist’s father.Directed by Michael Hoffman using a script which had won first Read more ...