| Date and venue | Title | Submitted by |
|---|---|---|
| 1-Sep-2012 Usher Hall | Edinburgh International Festival: RSNO play Ives, Feldman and Walton with David Robertson | Alan Coady |
 This, the final indoor concert of the 2012 Edinburgh International Festival (the closing Fireworks Concert takes place under the Castle Rock in Princes Street Gardens), was bookended by possibly the loudest and quietest sounds in the festival.
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| 1-Sep-2012 Queen's Hall, Edinburgh | Emerson String Quartet in Edinburgh play Mozart, Adès and Beethoven | Alan Coady |
 This festival's final morning recital boasted very minimal staging: one chair and four music stands. Sitting, for the last time in Edinburgh as a member of the Emerson Quartet, would be cellist David Finckel. Eschewing seats is not the only unusual element in the Emerson String Quartet; they also shun the traditional power structure of fixed first and second violin: Eugene Drucker and Philip Stetzer share leadership.
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| 31-Aug-2012 Usher Hall | Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Edinburgh play Mahler, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich | Alan Coady |
 'First impressions are often the truest', wrote Hazlitt. I was immediately struck by the amount of space on the Usher Hall stage, recently filled by so many large symphony orchestras. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra had plenty of space, a feature which was soon to be borne out in the music.
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| 30-Aug-2012 Edinburgh Festival Theatre | The Mariinsky bring a pitch-perfect Russian Cinderella to the Edinburgh International Festival | Hanna Weibye |
 Prokofiev’s Cinderella is not the easiest ballet to love. In his Romeo and Juliet a timeless story and lush, action-driven score ensure that even mediocre productions are heartbreaking. In Cinderella on the other hand, the good characters have a fairytale flatness, the evil step-family are grotesque, and the score is frequently chromatic, and jarring, as well as being filled with long divertissements that do not advance the action.
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| 26-Aug-2012 Usher Hall | Budapest Festival Orchestra in triumphant Bartók and Mahler | Jeremy Morris |
 The Budapest Festival Orchestra has played in Edinburgh before to great critical acclaim. Consequently, it was only to be expected that their concert last Sunday would be well attended, despite a late change of soloist. In fact, it was a virtual sell-out and we were not disappointed.
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| 22-Aug-2012 Usher Hall | Cleveland Orchestra 02 - Smetana, Lutosławski and Shostakovich | Alan Coady |
 The items in the Cleveland Orchestra's second programme shared one feature; unusual form with regard to the number of movements. Having played the first four movements of Smetana's Má Vlast the previous evening, here they presented the remaining two. And although the playing was commendable, with warmth, clarity and impressive use of dynamics, little of the notion of terror or violence came across. Students of composition could certainly learn how easily dated the extensive use of diminished chords can sound, when employed in the hope of drama.Read full review... | ||
| 22-Aug-2012 Greyfriars Kirk | World première of James MacMillan's Since it was the Day of Preparation... | Alan Coady |
 At one extreme of musical preparation, early music specialists rely on research to ensure authentic performance of music by composers long dead. At the other, composers writing today might well be acquainted with the performers and consult them on the technical possibility of some passages and attend rehearsals. This is likely to have been the case for James MacMillan's Since it was the Day of Preparation... whose world première took place in Edinburgh's historic Greyfriars Kirk.
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| 21-Aug-2012 Usher Hall | Cleveland Orchestra 01 - Lutosławski & Smetana | Alan Coady |
 The Cleveland Orchestra's two Slavic programmes form part of a larger Polish thread woven into this year's EIF. Witold Lutosławski's 1954 Concerto for Orchestra struck me as an ideal opening to the first concert. Its reliance on folk tunes, collected from the Masovia region (north of Warsaw) by ethnographer Oskar Kolberg, assures an unmistakably Polish flavour. Lutosławski seemed to regard these folk melodies as sufficiently robust in rhythm and implied harmony to withstand substantial opposition from what he called 'non-tonal chromatic counterpoints and harmonies'.Read full review... | ||
| 17-Aug-2012 Queen's Hall, Edinburgh | Kavakos and Lugansky deliver 20th century rarities by Janàček and Respighi | Jeremy Morris |
 One of the delights of instrumental recitals is their unpredictability. There is an element of challenge that all types have in common, however. How do you achieve the levels of excitement that retain the audience's attention with merely one or two performers on stage?
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| 16-Aug-2012 Usher Hall | Benedetti and Gergiev thrill a packed Usher Hall | Jeremy Morris |
 The current flagship project of the London Symphony Orchestra is to take on tour a series of concerts, under their Principal Conductor, which unite the symphonies and other major works of Brahms and Szymanowski. It is bold and imaginative, while remaining accessible and appealing. Last night's virtual sell-out at the Usher Hall is proof of that, as well as of the popularity of conductor and soloist.
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| 13-Aug-2012 Queen's Hall, Edinburgh | Trio Zimmermann at the Edinburgh Festival: Three voices equal one vision | Jeremy Morris |
 While there is a rich and varied literature for piano trio, works of quality that are composed purely for string trio (violin, viola and cello) are thin on the ground. Trio Zimmermann gave us a rare opportunity to hear some of the absolute gems from the repertoire this morning in a packed Queen's Hall in Edinburgh. The concert was so popular that not only was it broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, but even the standing areas in the upper galleries were partly occupied.
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| 11-Aug-2012 Edinburgh Festival Theatre | Opera North's production première of The Makropulos Case at the Edinburgh Festival | David Smythe |
 The strange yet compelling story of the 350-year-old opera singer Elina Makropulos was Opera North’s showcase in a production première at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival.
Leoš Janáček wrote The Makropulos Affair, his penultimate opera, based on the Karel Čapek play about Elina Makropulos, who was given a potion to preserve her youth when she was sixteen. It is a suspenseful thriller of a story, requiring a stand-out performance for a soprano to inhabit the main role.
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| 2-Sep-2011 Usher Hall | A time to dance | Alan Coady |
 It's about time. Certainly Chronochromie is about the colour of time, but grasping the essence of much of Messiaen's music depends on being in synchrony with his take on time in music – specifically intimations of the eternal. His endeavour to create such a musical environment requires jettisoning many of western music givens: regular metre; harmonic rhythm; a sense of destination and relief at its arrival. A mystic such as Messiaen was sufficiently comfortable with paradox to embrace the compositional rhythmic rigour that this approach would entail.Read full review... | ||
| 2-Sep-2011 Edinburgh Festival Theatre | The Mariinsky at Edinburgh serve up near-perfect Strauss | David Karlin |
 Once upon a time, an Emperor was hunting when his red falcon caught a white gazelle. As he grasped the animal, it transformed into a beautiful princess in his arms and they fell in love. She was the daughter of Keikobad, the King of the spirit world, a woman of such translucent beauty that she cast no shadow, but she lived under a curse...
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| 30-Aug-2011 Usher Hall | Le chant du cygne? | Alan Coady |
| When recession strikes, Stravinsky’s your man! Nothing is wasted and everything is convertible. The fact that his world and style had changed beyond recognition between beginning his opera, Le Chant du Rossignol in 1908 and finishing it in 1914 – three epoch-changing ballets later – did not seem to faze him. Nor did the deprivations of World War I, after which the work was transformed into a ballet score for smaller forces with the voice parts omitted.
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| 27-Aug-2011 Queen's Hall, Edinburgh | Dr. Borodin, I presume | Alan Coady |
 On Friday 26 August, Google chairman, Eric Schmidt, told a MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival audience, "Over the past century, the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths. You need to bring art and science back together." The following morning, Russia's Kopelman Quartet opened their capacity crowd Queen's Hall concert with String Quartet No. 1 in A, by a multi-lingual, multi-instrumentalist composer and professor of Chemistry – Alexander Borodin (1833-1857).Read full review... | ||
| 23-Aug-2011 Usher Hall | A Rite for All Seasons | Alan Coady |
 If I had the use of the TARDIS for one night, I'd head for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, May 29th 1913 – scene of the première of Stravinsky's, Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring). Apart from a strong desire to witness this historic moment in European cultural history, I'd be keen to show those tempted to loosen seats from their moorings in outrage, a photo of the 2,000 beaming faces at the end of the Philharmonia Orchestra's concert in Edinburgh's unthreatened Usher Hall.Read full review... | ||
| 20-Aug-2011 Queen's Hall, Edinburgh | The Art of Quartet | Alan Coady |
 The uncluttered stage mirrored the promised clarity of quality string quartet writing and playing; four chairs, four music stands, BBC microphones suspended on a wire, promising a future broadcast. A capacity Queen's Hall audience of 900 welcomed this young quartet, a decade after their Edinburgh International Festival début. Named after 1st violinist, Corina Belcea-Fisher, the former BBC New Generation Artists eased into the fifth of Haydn's Op. 20 'Sun' Quartets.Read full review... | ||
| 17-Aug-2011 Usher Hall | An orchestra descends into the circular auditorium | Alan Coady |
 The more intriguing a piece's title, the more interesting the endeavour to explore its connection to the compositional process. The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, under Kent Nagano, opened their Edinburgh Festival concert with a shimmering piece by Tōro Takemitsu (1930-1996). It's title, A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden (1977) refers less to a pentagon in the Euclidean sense than to a pentacle, or 5-point star.Read full review... | ||
| 13-Aug-2011 Usher Hall | ...towards a new listening | Alan Coady |
| British composer, Jonathan Harvey, could be described as the embodiment of this year's Edinburgh International Festival theme - Europe meets Asia. His spiritual journey, from Christianity via Steinerism to Vajrayana Buddhism, is reflected in his compositional path. This concert presented a trilogy of recent work resulting from Harvey's association with Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
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