First published in the Guardian on 29 August, 2016

Surely there’s an irony in the fact that some of the sweetest love music ever written — those impossibly tender strings when Waldemar utters the line “extraordinary Tove” — were penned by the man singularly blamed for the collapse of romanticism. But before he headed off into irrevocable atonality, a youngish Arnold Schoenberg made sure he had beaten the romantics at their own subjectively expressive game and created Gurrelieder as a resoundingly ultimate thing. The two-hour mega cantata comprises 11 French horns, four harps, eight flutes — basically imagine a standard symphony orchestra and double it, then add three male choruses, a mixed choir and six vocal soloists.

The sheer bigness made a splendid close to the 2016 Edinburgh International Festival (proper festival stuff, this) but there were deeper reasons why performing Gurrelieder on this stage made an apt last concert for Donald Runnicles’s tenure as chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. The Usher Hall was where it all began for the Edinburgh lad, who joined the inaugural Edinburgh Festival Chorus aged 12 for a performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, caught the craze of high romanticism and went off to become one of the world’s great conductors of Germanic opera. Musically, too, Gurrelieder made sense, because this is a work on the brink of 19th and 20th centuries grand idioms, simultaneously the overstuffed end of era and the birth of what came next. The unforgettable performances of Runnicles’s past seven years with the BBCSSO have been works positioned directly on either side: Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Berg’s Wozzeck.

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First published in The Herald on 29 August, 2016

It’s a lofty orchestra that chooses Beethoven’s Egmont Overture as an encore. This is music about a Flemish resistance leader who was executed during the Spanish Inquisition: its spirit is violent, indignant, defiant, hardly your classic cheery add-on. But it brought out the fiercest playing we’d heard yet from the Leipzig Gewandhaus and for that it was definitely welcome. Because although the past two nights had showcased the exceptional discipline and elegance of this ensemble, the suaveness of its phrasing, the sleekness of its blend, what felt missing was the kind of abandon and dangerous attack that finally arrived in those brooding Egmont chords.

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First published in the Guardian on 27 August, 2016

It’s the dregs of a war. Guglielmo and Ferrando are Italian Fascist soldiers stationed in Asmara, bored and unsupervised, and their pent-up machismo turns sexually abusive. Dorabella and Fiordiligi are colonial daughters whose relationship to local men pivots between disgust and desire — which adds to the fun when their boyfriends play a trick on them by blacking up as Dubat mercenaries. Ha ha.

After this production opened in Aix-en-Provence, letters were sent out to everyone who had bought tickets to see it in Edinburgh, warning of explicit adult themes. Film director Christophe Honore transplants Mozart’s opera to 1930s Eritrea and the curtain raises on a black girl dancing to Calypso then being raped by a Fascist soldier. And so it goes on, though in fact none of the violence is particularly explicit, not compared to even a 15-rated movie.

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First published in The Herald on 27 August, 2016

It was a weird way to kick off a two-day residency by one of the world’s great symphony orchestras: 15 musicians on stage gathered around a harpsichord to play Bach’s E Major Violin Concerto with violinist Julian Rachlin hammering out the solo part like a pastiche of overheated pre-baroque-revivalism. I’m not convinced he knew the music all that well given how clunky his corners were and how forced his delivery. It takes some doing to make a joyous piece sound quite so shouty.

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First published in the Guardian on 24 August, 2016

Two years ago the Minnesota Orchestra emerged from a bitter lockout during which its music director Osmo Vänskä resigned in protest (he was later rehired). Now here they all are, touring Europe again against the odds, and that ultra-plush, super-charged Minnesota sound is back with a new added edge of tenacity. They played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony like a resounding declaration and Vänskä took big pride in those classic ringing trumpets, sleek winds and gloriously bottom-heavy strings. The match here has always been thrilling — his dynamism on the podium plus the powerful engine of this band — and now there seems something irrepressibly triumphant about it. Sibelius’s brooding tone poem Pohjala’s Daughter opened the concert and the surging energy was immense.

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