Never mind the grey skies – the music supplied the sunshine
Live music is back at the Edinburgh International Festival. That’s something worth celebrating, and there was a full house to witness the Opening Concert, given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. However, the pandemic still casts a shadow. The festival director Fergus Linehan took the decision to forswear the splendid Usher Hall, the normal venue for concerts, as social distancing couldn’t be guaranteed there. Instead we were in one of three specially constructed festival stages, a large tent open to the winds, set in the grounds of Edinburgh Academy School.
Fortunately, the threatening, grey skies didn’t turn nasty, and only the occasional seagull spoiled the calm. The array of more than 50 speakers around the hall magnified the sound so subtly that one was only subliminally aware of an extra silvery sheen on the glockenspiel and brass.
That was absolutely right for the music, which was chosen to lift the spirits and bring some Mediterranean sunshine into the traditional Scottish summer. The curtain-raiser was a newly commissioned piece from Anna Clyne, a former student at Edinburgh University and now a flourishing composer in New York. Its title, Pivot, made one expect something severely abstract, but the piece turned out to be a witty homage to an Edinburgh folk-music pub once named the Pivot.
With its opening brass fanfare, its tipsy evocations of Scottish dancing and occasional sudden turns to oboe-flavoured melancholy, it had all the ingredients of those overtures that composers such as Malcolm Arnold were composing back in the 1950s. But the astringent soundworld, the startling switch-backs in the form and the intriguing rhythmic “kick” in the dance held that cliché at bay. It takes real skill to compose something musically engaging that is also right for the occasion, and Clyne proved she has it in spades.
With the next piece, Botticelliana, astringency was swept away in sumptuously warm string trills, swirling harps and tinkling glockenspiels. Respighi’s homage to the great Italian painter needs rapturous playing to come to life, which the BBC Symphony Orchestra under conductor Dalia Stasevska provided in abundance.
Astringency of a delightfully energising, tangy kind came back in the final piece, Stravinsky’s
Pulcinella. It was performed in the complete ballet version with three vocal soloists who sing about happy shepherdesses, the agonies of love, and those scheming women who “keep a hundred men on a leash”.
It’s impossible to discern a plot in this song-and-dance mélange, but when performed with such irresistible rhythmic élan as it was here, one didn’t feel inclined to complain. Tenor Filipe Manu and bass-baritone Michael Mofidian were excellent as the pining lovers, but it was mezzo-soprano Rosie Aldridge’s heart-melting rendition of “Se tu m’ami” (If you love me) that stole the show.