Youth choir raises the roof at festival opener
Scottish Chamber Orchestra Haydn’s Creation, Usher Hall
Art is supposed to jerk us from our comfort zone, and there’s plenty at the Edinburgh International Festival that does exactly that. Saturday night’s opening concert took a different tack. It returned us to a comfort zone, long since taken away by the march of science, with Haydn’s Creation. This offers a view of the world where everything is divinely ordained, every creature has its place, and darkness and chaos only exist to be driven away by the light of the Almighty.
It’s a beautiful vision, etched in Haydn’s grandest and most sweetly picturesque music, which shone with special vividness. Haydn’s score is littered with pauses, as if he wants the performers to savour the moment “great whales” or the babbling brook magically appear. Conductor Edward Gardner allowed us to savour them, but never for more than a moment. This was an unusually urgent Creation, as if God were impatient. “Representation of Chaos” can often sound romantically melancholy – as if chaos is yearning for God’s creative hand – but here it had an iron implacable force, the timpani of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra sounding more like the Last Judgment than the great beginning of everything.
Then the narrative surged forward, bass Neal Davies listing each creature with breathless excitement, as if he could hardly keep up. But in the later stages, Gardner allowed tempos and sentiments to expand, so the final duet between Adam and Eve – sung with touching naivety by soprano Sarah Tynan and Davies – unfolded with rapturous slowness. Tenor Robert Murray summoned such a sweetly sincere tone that even when mankind is warned not to be too curious had an emotional truth.
In this piece many individual players have a starring role, and the players of the orchestra certainly seized their moment. But the real heroes of the evening were the National Youth Choir of Scotland. Their fervent young voices made the Handel-like grandeur of the final choruses ring out, and in the blazing affirmation “Let there be LIGHT” they raised the roof.
Hear this concert on BBC Radio 3 on 10 Sept and for 30 days thereafter via the Radio 3 website. The Edinburgh International Festival continues until 27 August; 0131 573 2000