EIF music reviews: 900 Voices | Il Pomo d’Oro

The EIF’s sound installation at St Giles’ Cathedral is a calming break from the festival noise.
900 Voices at St Giles' Cathedral is a sonic treat.900 Voices at St Giles' Cathedral is a sonic treat.
900 Voices at St Giles' Cathedral is a sonic treat.

MUSIC

900 Voices ****

St Giles’ Cathedral until 25 August

If you’re looking for a little respite from the festival madness, you could do far worse than head for the cool interior of St Giles’ Cathedral, transformed more overtly than ever into a space for contemplation and reflection by sonic installation 900 Voices. Conceived as part of the Cathedral’s 900th anniversary celebrations – and created by composers Zoë Irvine and Jules Rawlinson with designer Lindsay Perth – it fills St Giles’ with voices, young and old, faltering and confident, joyful and melancholy, but all of them cunningly cast right across the building’s dozens of interior speakers. The result is sometimes a clamorous, bewildering cacophony, sometimes something far subtler and quieter, even occasionally silence. But 900 Voices’ theme remains constant: ideas of community and belonging, as expressed by residents right across the city, and especially relevant at a time when Edinburgh becomes temporary home to thousands from across the world.

And although there’s much to experiencing 900 Voices that offers a calming break from the festival hubbub happening just metres from St Giles’ doors, it’s far more than just an arty chill-out zone. For a start, computer processing means that the work never repeats: sit and listen, and you might hear it fade to silence and burst into life again as cycles end and begin, but they’re never quite the same. There are wonderful subtleties, too, to the work’s throwing of vowel sounds or mantra-like words – family, home, work – to all corners of the Cathedral, and occasionally voices slow to become musical tones, piling up in lavish harmonies. There’s more than a flavour of early electronic pieces by Stockhausen or Jonathan Harvey to certain moments.

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But the real success of 900 Voices lies in the richness of ideas and sonic textures it derives from its simple concept, and the community of listeners that the piece itself generates, while immersing them in Edinburgh residents’ experiences of their city and each other. It’s a revealing and at times deeply moving creation. David Kettle

MUSIC

Il Pomo d’Oro / Jakob Józef Orliński *****

Queen’s Hall

When a countertenor rounds off a programme of Italian Baroque music with a Freddie Mercury-style call-and-response - and yes, he took it to that extreme point of complexity where the audience had no hope of imitating - you know you’ve witnessed a unique combination of musical virtuosity and crowd-pulling charisma.

This was Polish countertenor, Jakob Józef Orliński, whose wider talents as a model, influencer and breakdancer also had their place, sympathetically, in this opening Queen’s Hall concert.

He was effectively “front man” to crack period ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro, in what was an ostensibly disparate collection of operatic excerpts and instrumental numbers - from Monteverdi to Moratelli via Caccini, Strozzi and Sartorio et al - moulded into a quasi-theatrical free-flowing journey that barely drew breath. Orliński’s magnetic pizazz was the wow factor, his voice penetratingly expressive yet riskily ripened, his omnipresent physicality - he actually ended with a b-boy kick - tastefully in keeping but dazzlingly show-stopping.

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The Mercury moment came in the third of four encores demanded by an increasingly hyped-up audience. Orliński played them like a rock star. His message to any artists lined up for the rest of this Queen’s Hall series? Beat that! Ken Walton

Dare to be Honest
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