Scotland
David Kettle
Meet Me at Dawn ★★★★★ Edinburgh-based playwright Zinnie Harris is the subject of a particular focus at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, with three productions in collaborations with leading Scottish theatre companies. Her blazing adaptation of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros has been pulling crowds at the Lyceum Theatre, and her searing Aeschylus reboot This Restless House, created with Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland, opens next week.It’s another Greek myth – that of Orpheus and Eurydice – that simmers in the background of Meet Me at Dawn at the Read more ...
David Kettle
It was an intriguing, contrast-filled programme that Swiss-born pianist Andreas Haefliger brought to Edinburgh for his Queen’s Hall recital at the International Festival. Two masterpieces of musical picture painting – Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and the smaller but equally evocative St Francis of Assisi’s Sermon to the Birds by Liszt – alongside two far more abstract works: Berg’s compact but punchy Sonata Op. 1 and Beethoven’s Op. 101 Sonata.You might have expected two entirely different musical approaches, then – one all hot-headed, vivid musical storytelling, the other cool and Read more ...
David Nice
So it was Rachmaninov night at the Proms, but with a difference: a trinity of works sacred and profane, the first two introduced by the Latvian choir due to perform the third singing harmonised Russian Orthodox chants of the kind on which the composer based so many of his supposedly late-romantic inspirations. That was bound to enliven a bog-standard programme of the Third Piano Concerto and the Second Symphony. But there was plenty of fresh food in soloist Alexander Gavrylyuk’s singular take on "the Rach Three", and Thomas Dausgaard, principal conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Read more ...
graham.rickson
Prokofiev: Piano Concertos 1&3, Overture on Hebrew Themes Simon Trpčeski (piano), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko (Onyx)Good recordings can make you notice things you've never heard before. Like this one: Simon Trpčeski’s balletic, light-footed account of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No 3 is outstanding. It's one of the swifter performances on disc, Trpčeski matched every step of the way by Vasily Petrenko's pliant Liverpool players. Listen to the way the first movement's second subject is enunciated so crisply, and how often do we get to hear the lower strings Read more ...
David Nice
When Glyndebourne's Music Director Robin Ticciati conducts the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the new production of Mozart's La clemenza di Tito starting tonight, you can be sure that it will sound utterly fresh, startling even. As did their collaboration on two earlier Mozart operas, La finta giardiniera in 2014 and Die Entführung aus dem Serail the following season – and, in a class of its own, his richly vindicated decision to conduct the last three Mozart symphonies with his Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a single evening last October.This three-act orchestral drama, with the Read more ...
David Nice
Elisabeth Leonskaja, Schubert's greatest living interpreter, was always going to be Queen of Scotland's East Neuk for three summer days; her performances of four piano works and the "Trout" Quintet with outstanding string players were transcendental. But this festival is exceptional in keeping several pertinent strands flowing, from year to year and within the annual span. So there were rival events to match the classical peak: guitarist Sean Shibe and clarinettist Julian Bliss solo and multiplied in a small hall by the sea, 60 brass players of all ages memorialising the former Fife mining Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Maurice Hatton’s 1978 Long Shot comes with the subtitle “A film about filmmaking”, a nod at what has practically become a cinematic sub-category in itself. But while other directors have used the genre for philosophical or aesthetic rumination, Hatton’s subject is far more immediate and down-to-earth – the perilous business of just trying to get a movie made.Specifically, an independent movie: Long Shot is a glorious satire on the sheer rigmarole of attempting to stitch a deal together. It’s set against the backdrop of the 1977 Edinburgh Film Festival, which gives rich extra atmosphere, and Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Labels have their uses but they can also be a blight. The works of the Scottish playwright James Bridie – with their regional accents and domestic settings – bear many of the hallmarks of so-called Kitchen Sink drama but didn’t make the canon. Not grimy enough, perhaps, not English enough, and certainly not angry enough. The playwright is better remembered as a founder of Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival.All power to the Finborough then in its campaign to save Bridie’s writing from terminal neglect. Last year saw the first production in 70 years of Dr Angelus, a play Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
There’s something nasty in Loch Ness – a corpse tied to a curling stone – but, this being tellyland, the real monsters lurk on its shores. The Loch aspires to be a Scottish Broadchurch – Braidkirk? – but, alas, is nothing of the sort. The fact it is set in the fictional town of Lochnafoy – clearly based on Loch Na Fooey in Galway whose name means grave-shaped lake – is an early indication that writer Stephen Brady has not gone far to find his inspiration.An early scene in which three students arrange a load of bones and offal in the shape of a beached Nessie – while Read more ...
David Kettle
Time travel, Britpop, Sleeping Beauty. Classical ballet, the ravages of alcoholism, serial poisoning. There’s plenty going on in Douglas Maxwell’s idiosyncratic Charlie Sonata at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre – so much, in fact, that it’s hard to know what it all adds up to.Girvan-born Maxwell is known for his poignant dissections of contemporary issues – he had big Fringe hits in the early 2000s with Decky Does a Bronco and Our Bad Magnet, plus plenty of well-received productions since then. Charlie Sonata feels like his most ambitious offering so far, but also his most uneven. It’s clearly a Read more ...
David Kettle
In the end, it’s all about Mamillius. It’s he – the young son of Leontes of Sicily – who launches director Max Webster’s really quite magical new production of Shakespeare’s credibilty-busting tragedy-cum-comedy at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, suggesting it’s all a child’s made-up story in the first place. It's he who fast-forwards us 16 years just after the interval.And it’s he – superbly played by young Will Robertson on press night (the role alternates between two youngsters) – who provides the uncanny sense of innocence and wonder in Webster’s production, as though it’s all seen through Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Mention the name “Barbara Dickson” and everyone remembers “I Know Him so Well”, the duet with Elaine Paige which hit the top spot in 1985, the era of big hair, shoulders pads and dry ice. That song didn’t feature in Dickson’s concert at Union Chapel, but those who came to hear her other top 20 hits – “Answer Me”, “Caravans” and “January February” – weren’t disappointed. The last was the appropriate opener on a frigid February eve, but like everything she played, it was totally reinvented.Quite deservedly, Dickson has enjoyed considerable commercial success and won awards for her acting (“Tell Read more ...