First published in The Herald on 6 July, 2016
What’s in a name? Quite a bit, it seems, if you’re an Italian institution with several centuries of Papal patronage and the contours of nation building and 20th century political history etched into your fortunes. The Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia— and no, that title can’t be shortened (I did ask) — is heir to one of the oldest musical institutions in the world, a Roman academy founded in 1585 with Palestrina as one of its earliest members. Back then the name was even longer: the Congregazione dei Musici sotto l’invocazione della Beata Vergine e dei Santi Gregorio e Cecilia, or The Congregation of Musicians under the Invocation of the Blessed Virgin, Saint Gregory and Saint Cecilia. You get the sense they weren’t thinking of hashtagability for the digital age.
The opening weekend of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival features the Santa Cecilia orchestra (let’s work with that) who last visited to Scotland 68 years ago almost to the day. Back then the festival itself was just a bairn, founded out of the wreckage of the Second World War in the hope that art and internationalism could build a better world. Santa Cecilia gave six concerts on six consecutive nights under three different conductors including Wilhem Furtwangler. What a statement it was to invite an Italian orchestra and a German conductor, particularly one who had weathered a complicated relationship with the Third Reich. “With his scanty hair and long neck, he suggests an elderly bird of passage,” noted the Scottish Daily Mail on 9 September 1948. “Personally he is remote and aloof, wrapped in a manner which indicates: ‘I am the inestimable Furtwangler.’”