Edinburgh
Miranda Heggie
It’s hard to imagine that The Arches – a string of stylish glass-fronted units in prime city centre location, housing boutique bars, high-end eateries and stylish salons – were once a bunch of old storage units which were opened up a decade ago by a volunteer-run, grassroots arts festival calling itself Hidden Door.Over the past 10 years Hidden Door has revitalised myriad disused spaces across the city including office blocks, a derelict cinema, a sealed-up theatre and an old gas works. So when the venue for their 10th birthday party was revealed as a car park in an upmarket shopping centre Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The annual St Matthew Passion from the Dunedin Consort is one the most reliably beautiful jewels in Edinburgh’s musical year. They do the St John Passion much less frequently; in fact, this is the first time I’ve heard them do it, maybe motivated by its tercentenary this year.Doing both of the passions in the space of a week is pretty much unprecedented, however, both for the performers and for the Edinburgh audience, and experiencing both in seven days not only allowed comparisons but deepened the relationship between these complementary Bach masterpieces.Much of that was down to the work of Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
For the second year in a row the Royal Scottish National Orchestra chose to share its platform in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall with the young musicians of St Mary's Music School. As RSNO chief executive Alistair Mackie pointed out in a short opening speech, the links between the two organisations run deep, as many players in the RSNO started their musical careers at St Mary's.The format of the evening was a repeat of last year, with 40 minutes or so of short solos from the youngsters preceding the main RSNO concert. As before, the orchestral stage set was shoved into the wings to hollow out enough Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Most concert promoters will tell you that contemporary music tends to be, to put it politely, a tricky sell, which is one of the reasons why it’s most often programmed alongside Beethoven or Tchaikovsky. A whole programme of the stuff tends to be box office suicide, so it’s almost never done.It’s a testament to something or other, then, that not only was (almost) everything in this Scottish Chamber Orchestra programme written in the last 50 years, but that they got a remarkably good audience for it; certainly nothing smaller than another regular season concert. What’s their secret?Some of it Read more ...
Simon Thompson
While it is an incontrovertibly good thing that the classical music world has set about rediscovering the work of neglected female composers, not all rediscoveries are equally worthy of being found. Particularly on a day like International Women’s Day (IWD), concert programmers run the risk of unearthing work that tends towards the mediocre, and which can end up being tokenistic.Not on this IWD concert, however. I’d never heard of Mel Bonis (pictured below) until this Royal Scottish National Orchestra concert, but her Trois femmes de légende proved a delight. She studied with Franck in Paris Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus has a well-established concert life away from the main orchestra; the Royal Scottish National Orchestra Chorus less so. So it was refreshing to get to hear them going it (almost) alone in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk, and the Bruckner anniversary gave them a good excuse, building their programme around a motet and the E minor Mass.Distinctive choral concerts like this are good for any choir because it encourages them to push out on their own a bit and gives them more exposure, as well as more repertoire. This concert showcased a lot of their strengths, Read more ...
David Kettle
In terms of conveying monumental events using small-scale means, Edinburgh’s Tortoise in a Nutshell visual theatre company has form. Their 2013 Feral, for example, depicted the social breakdown of an apparently idyllic seaside town using puppetry and a lovingly assembled miniature set, to quietly devastating effect.Their new show Ragnarok – a collaboration with Norway’s Figurteatret i Nordland, based in the far-flung Lofoten Islands – goes quite a lot further, and proved a powerful climax to the ten-day Manipulate festival of animation, puppetry and visual theatre running across the city. Read more ...
David Kettle
There’s been an incident in Edinburgh. Right near the Scottish Parliament. Several dead, many more injured. Among the witnesses were two of the capital’s young football stars, now clearly traumatised by what they’ve seen. Someone shouting about women running the world, inflicting their agenda on powerless men. Something needs to happen – these people should be hunted down, made to pay for what they’ve done.The questions are there right from the startling opening of this slippery new show aiming to dissect Incel culture from a consortium of Scottish theatre companies – Civic Digits, Stellar Read more ...
David Kettle
Evil walks among us. But it doesn’t arrive courtesy of mad scientists, bubbling potions and horrifying transformations. Instead, it comes from ordinary people surrendering themselves to their basest desires and resentments. Even worse, doing that feels… good.Anyone expecting jump scares and hideous, barely human creatures from Jekyll and Hyde at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre – boiled down from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella into an intense 70-minute solo show by Scottish writer and performer Gary McNair – might be disappointed, at least partially. Indeed, there’s quite a bit about McNair’s Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Violinist Jonas Ilias-Kadesha was placed front and centre of the publicity for this concert. This is his first season concert with the SCO, though back in 2019 he stood in for an indisposed soloist at short notice for one of their European tours. Inviting him back is a vote of confidence, so I was looking forward to hearing him as soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Ravel’s Tzigane.His Mozart turned out to be a very mixed bag, however. It began well, with clipped, precise playing from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the opening tutti, and an improvisatory opening flourish from Read more ...
David Kettle
You can keep your Cinderellas, your Aladdins, your wannabe Lord Mayors of London. The way forward with Christmas shows is clearly women’s football – more specifically, a Scottish five-a-side team that competes in the Homeless World Cup.You’ve got to hand it to Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre for the sheer audacity of presenting such a shamelessly un-Christmassy show as its… er… Christmas show. In fact, there’s plenty about Same Team – its sometimes distressing details of abuse, neglect and deprivation, for example, but also its gloriously rich lexicon of profanities – that makes is decidedly Read more ...
David Nice
On an Edinburgh afternoon of torrential rain close to the winter solstice, what ecstasy to be transported to an ancient Greek midsummer day, a Claude landscape with shepherds calling across the hills, painted in the most translucent colours by Richard Strauss in his late mastery. All it needs are world-class voices and an orchestra that glows; it got both in Scottish Opera’s concert staging. From photos taken at earlier performances in Glasgow and the Lammermuir Festival back in September, the worry was that director Emma Jenkins’ thoughts would tend too much to the troubled 1930s in Read more ...