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SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL MUSIC FESTIVAL REPORT

 


Edinburgh International Festival 2009:  Simon Thompson takes a look back at the season (SRT)


Edinburgh this August was a celebration of the Scottish Enlightenment and of the big composer anniversaries. When first I saw this year’s programme I was a bit nonplussed with the large (excessive?) quantities of Handel on offer, but in fact these performances were among the Festival’s most successful. After a somewhat manufactured controversy about the opening concert (Judas Maccabaeus was written to celebrate the Duke of Cumberland’s victory at Culloden) things settled down to some fantastic music making with Jordi Savall bringing his distinctive and exciting personal touch to the Fireworks and Water Music. The Bach Collegium Japan’s Rinaldo was one of the finest baroque opera performances I’ve heard, and ironically a far more satisfying experience than the well sung but indifferently staged Admeto. The Göttingen Festival crew really came up trumps with Mendelssohn’s arrangement of Acis and Galatea, however, the most fun evening I had all festival.

For me the Haydn commemorations were less satisfying, with a mannered and unsatisfying evening by the OAE under Norrington. Mendelssohn, on the other hand, got a great representation from Philippe Herreweghe. The Orchestre des Champs Elysées did a marvellous spring-clean job with the Scottish Symphony after a very lacklustre Chopin 2. When joined by the Collegium Vocale Gent, however, they really took off in Elias, providing me with a startling reassessment of a work I had as good as written off.

Bach, that most Enlightened of composers, was celebrated by a series at Greyfriars with varied success: intimate searching from the Ricercar Consort but over-mannered pretensions from the EU Baroque Orchestra. The finest Bach of the fortnight, however, was delivered by the Monteverdi Choir under Gardiner with a very well chosen programme of angelic cantatas for Michaelmas coupled with a fantastically coloured performance of Part 1 of Israel in Egypt.

Contemporary music got a great showing in the inventive St Kilda and a great RSNO evening crowned by Macmillan’s Confession of Isobel Gowdie. This linked into this year’s big theatre event, Rona Munro’s new play The Last Witch. Silviu Purcarete’s massive Faust packed them out at the Lowland Hall in Ingliston, but for me the greatest theatrical moment was provided in the far more intimate setting of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, an utterly engrossing showcase of the power of the spoken word.

The congenial surroundings of the Queen’s Hall always provide the most intimate musical experiences of the festival. Fine as was Christoph Pregardien, the song recital that moved me most was Bejun Mehta’s, especially his wonderfully touching An die Ferne Geliebte, though the finest of all the QH concerts this year was a brilliantly imagined programme of transcriptions by the Second Viennese school, something that will live long in my musical memory.

All told  though, I thought that the stars of this year’s festival were the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, who have never sounded finer, whether as the grotesque witches in Verdi’s Macbeth or the demons and angels in Gerontius. Their artistic reputation seems safe in the hands of Christopher Bell who has engineered a great renaissance in their musical fortunes. Were I to award one, he would win my prize for single greatest contribution to this year’s festival. What a shame we have to wait a whole year to hear them again!

Simon Thompson