RSNO'S new digital season offers plenty of reasons to be cheerful
Even when theatres are finally able to reopen, the Traverse will continue with its online work
We could all do with a little more positivity, especially in the arts. So two exciting announcements by the RSNO are reasons to be cheerful. Along with the expected unveiling of a further nine-concert digital series to take us into the summer months comes the welcome news that music director Thomas Søndergård is to renew his RSNO contract for a further three years, extending his dynamic partnership with the orchestra to Autumn 2024.
The announcement came inevitably via Zoom, Søndergård speaking from Berlin where he was making his unexpected debut with the Berlin Philharmonic following a lastminute call to replace Sir Donald Runnicles. The newly-knighted Scot was unable to travel due to Covid restrictions.
Such restrictions, fingers crossed, shouldn’t stop Søndergård heading for Scotland in early March to record the opening concert of this latest RSNO mini-season and a programme (available from 16 April) that provides the springboard for an ambitious Polish theme – Polska Scotland
– that runs through the entire series, and which sees recording switch to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall main auditorium. It features Nicola Benedetti as soloist in Karol Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No 1, Andrzej Panufnik’s Third Symphony “Sinfonia Sacra,” and Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes by Mieczysław Weinberg (Polish-born composer of the film sound track to Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula).
“These are substantial pieces,” RSNO chief executive Alistair Mackie says. “We can now use a maximum of 75 players in the main auditorium, compared to around 59 previously.”
The predominant Polish theme, which mostly existed as a key thread in the RSNO’S original 2020-21 season plans, coincides with this year’s Clydebank Blitz centenary. But there is a special link between Panufnik’s Sinfonia Sacra and the RSNO. When
the orchestra toured Poland in 1978, Sir Alexander Gibson insisted on including the symphony’s Polish premiere despite the communist authorities’ aversion to its strong Christian message. Panufnik was by then a dissident living in the UK. “They did not welcome the performance, but they did not stop it,” Panufnik’s widow, Lady Camilla, recently recalled.
Benedetti returns for the closing concert (released 11 June), when she performs the second Szymanowski concerto under principal guest conductor Elim Chan. Chan also teams up in the final two concerts with pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 1, and conducts both Lutoslawski’s and Bartók’s Concertos for Orchestra.
Other guest conductors making their RSNO debuts include the awardwinning 21-year-old Angus Webster in Barber’s Violin Concerto with leader Maya Iwabuchi as soloist; Marta Gardolińska in Dvorak’s
Seventh Symphony and Lutoslawski’s Little Suite; and Munich Symphony Orchestra maestro Kevin John Edusei in a Teutonic cocktail of Mahler, Schubert and Schumann.
The six orchestral programmes will be offset by three chamber recitals featuring RSNO player groups with guest appearances by pianists Paul Lewis and Alasdair Beatson.
“Digital is not going to go away,” reflects Mackie. “I’d like to see a blended model in the future, where people can come back to live music in the concert hall, but equally choose to watch it again when they get home. There’s certainly a place for both. Our aim is to keep recording all our concerts.” Mini-seasons will also remain a feature.
Søndergård is equally upbeat. “I’d like to get back to bigger things, to continue our Mahler cycle, to tackle some Bruckner, which would be great for the brass section. We may go into a French corner also, not the usual Debussy and Ravel. I’d like to explore composers like Roussel or Ibert, whom I’ve discovered during the Covid period.”
Big ideas are exactly what we need just now, even if we have to wait patiently for them to happen.
“Digital is not going to go away. I’d like to see a blended model in the future”
Full details of the new RSNO Digital Season available at www.rsno.org.uk
In Cambridge Street, the foyer doors are closed at Scotland’s world-famous new writing theatre; and Traverse 1 and Traverse 2 are dark, apart from the occasional carefully distanced visit or workshop session. It’s not like that, though, in Traverse 3; because the theatre’s new online space, invented just before last year’s cancelled Edinburgh Festival season, is alive with activity, this month and always. Log in, and you’ll find around two dozen events available, some live, some recorded, some ticketed and paid for, others completely free. This week alone, there are two live evenings of readings and discussion on plays from the Traverse’s First Stages programme for emerging writers, a lunchtime Q&A with acclaimed Irish playwright Enda Walsh, and a Saturday workshop with Hannah Lavery, author of the magnificent Lament For Sheku Bayoh, as well as podcasts, workshops, and a reading of a new play by brilliant Glasgow-based writer Michael John O’neill.
And all this is to say nothing of Shedinburgh, an online world invented last summer by Scottish playwright and performer Gary Mcnair and producers Francesca Moody and Harriet Bolwell. Shedinburgh is not a Traverse production, and has its own website; but its work – some of it performed and recorded last August from a shed built in the auditorium of Traverse 2 – is closely entwined with the Traverse’s recent repertoire, and its new month-long “greatest hits” season, launched this week, includes many shows previously seen at the Traverse, including Status by Chris Thorpe, White Rabbit Red Rabbit by Nassim Soleimanpour, My Arm by Tim Crouch, and Mcnair’s own Mcgonagall’s Chronicles.
“After the first shock of lockdown,” says the Traverse’s co-artistic director Gareth Nicholls, “I think we just pivoted really quickly towards digital work. In a sense, we had no choice; we needed to keep in touch both with our audiences, and with all the artists we work with. The invention of Traverse 3 came soon after that, as a virtual all-year-round Festival venue; the idea was to re-create a sense of togetherness and liveness, and of community, even if we had to do it online.”
Alongside the challenge involved in trying to take theatre online, the past pandemic year has also highlighted many social issues of the kind Traverse writers have often tackled, including the multiple issues of race and the legacy of Empire thrown up by the Black Lives Matter movement; and this week, the Traverse announced a series of new resident artist appointments that reflect a growing commitment to reflect on Scotland’s colonial history, and its diverse present.
So the theatre’s new IASH fellows, sponsored by the Institute of Arts, Sciences and Humanities at Edinburgh University, will be the playwright Raman Mundair, who lived most of her life in Shetland, and Edinburgh-based playwright, actress and singer Apphia Campbell. The Traverse has also appointed two new creative producers for its Class Act project, in Robbie Gordon of Wonder Fools and Wezi Muhra, the woman behind the powerful series of Black Lives Matter graphics across the facades of Scotland’s theatres during last year’s lockdown. And the Traverse writer in residence, this year, is Uma Nada-rajah, a West Lothian-based playwright who also works as an NHS staff nurse, and whose 2018 Play, Pie And Pint play Toy Plastic Chicken won widespread acclaim.
“For me,” says Nada-rajah, “it’s just a real thrill to be appointed writer in residence at the Traverse. When I joined the theatre’s new writers’ group in 2010, it was really my first glimpse of what a professional new writing theatre could be, and it meant everything to me. My aim is to bring raw stories to the table, and I have two ideas in mind at the moment. One is a kind of macabre exploration of the ideal of universal healthcare, and how it can come under threat from politicians who never have to show any of the basic competence and honesty that are expected from ordinary healthcare workers every day; and the other explores my own heritage as a northern Sri Lankan, and the story of the women who became fierce female fighters for the Tamil Tigers during Sri Lanka’s civil war. It was such a counter-cultural thing for them to do, to cut their hair and go to war, and I find it absolutely fascinating.”
All of which should be music to Nicholls’s ears, as the Traverse looks forward to new times.
“I think there’s no question that our commitment to digital work will remain,” says Nicholls. “We’ve learned too much about what it can achieve to let it go, and although it can never replace live performance, it can run parallel with it. I think theatre will survive, and be resilient, and evolve, in the aftermath of the pandemic; and I think the arts in general are going to be fundamental to our recovery from this. We’re going to need to congregate together, to try to understand what we went through, and to work out what we want the future to be. And the Traverse’s job, as ever, will be to provide space for that, in every way we can – online, and in the theatre, as soon as we can open our doors again.”
“Our commitment to digital work will remain, we’ve learned too much about what it can achieve to let it go”
For more information about Traverse 3 events, visit www.traverse.co.uk