THIS year's Festival music programme began strangely and ended strangely. The biggest question hanging over Saturday's closing performance of Michael Tippett's A Child of our Time was: why Gennadi Rozhdestvensky?
The 77-year-old conductor is both
a legend and an enigma. Was Jonathan Mills simply trying to put a big-time name against a work that might not sell well on its own? The outcome was a performance by the BBC SSO and Edinburgh Festival Chorus that seemed more like a preliminary stab in the dark than a well-considered presentation.
For this was not a performance that revealed the difficult strengths of Tippett's emotive protest oratorio – the organic emergence of the spirituals, the restless mutation of styles, or the underpinning power of its pungent instrumentation. Instead, Rozhdestvensky appeared (literally in his trademark throwaway style) to pick his way through the highlights. The ensemble, too often, sounded nervous and hesitant.
And what a waste, given the superb solo quartet of angelic soprano Nicole Cabell, Jane Irwin (sounding more like Kathleen Ferrier by the day), John Mark Ainsley and the giant of them all, John Tomlinson. Ultimately, it seemed to sum up what has been a strangely mixed Edinburgh Festival.
The full article contains 209 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
