Edinburgh International Festival music reviews: Melbourne Symphony Orchestra | Master Musicians with Peirani and Segal | William Barton | Up Late With Joep Beving & Maarten Vos | Leonidas Kavakos & The Apollon | Master Musicians with Peirani and Segal
Didgeridooist William Barton dazzles not just one but two of our critics both as part of a guest turn with the five-star Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and at his own headline show
MUSIC
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra ★★★★★
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
The visual programming of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s concert could well have been a movie. With conductor Jaime Martin they transported us to the sunny climes of Italy in Elgar’s In the South, a perfect opener to showcase every section of this fabulous ensemble.
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It’s not every day you see a Yidaki (Didgeridoo) on a concert platform and soloist William Barton’s unveiling of the world premiere of Deborah Cheetham Fraillon’s Treaty for Yidaki and Orchestra was utterly mesmerising. He produced an astonishing array of primordial whoops and yowls offering us a glimpse into the Aboriginal dreamtime. The orchestra beautifully framed Barton’s virtuosic evocation of the Australian bush: the screech of a galah, cackle of a laughing Kookaburra, air that sizzles in the heat and songs around the campfire passed down through the generations.
Musical cameos of a different sort were depicted in Mussorsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Inspired by Victor Hartmann’s images and originally written for piano, Ravel’s vivid, technicolour arrangement of these quirky scenes included mysterious toys, Baby Yaga, the ballet of unhatched chicks and the triumphant great gates of Kyiv. The orchestra relished this fantastical piece with its inspired deployment of the tuba, saxophone, contrabassoon and piccolo trumpet.
SUSAN NICKALLS
MUSIC
Master Musicians with Peirani and Segal ★★★★
The Hub
Making a welcome return to the Festival, and this year marking the foundation’s 25th anniversary, the Aga Khan Master Musicians, drawing on Islamic musical cultures across the Middle East and Asia, presented a characteristically richly toned and inventive amalgam of instrumentalists. One this occasion, however, returning luminaries – Wu Man on the pipa or Chinese lute, soprano saxophonist Basel Rajoub, Feras Charestan on qanun – the Persian plucked zither and Yurdal Tokcan on oud, the Arabic lute – were joined by two French guests, formidable accordionist Vincent Peirani and eclectically-minded cellist Vincent Segal.
Between them they created a glowing tapestry of timbres and textures, the brighter-toned strings of zither and pipa contrasting with the reedy voices of saxophone and diatonic button accordion, as in their opening number, which developed into a circus-like swirl.
A composition of Charestan’s opened with plangent cello deliberations joined by zither chimes before merging into a stately, haunting melody, Wu’s Dance of the Yi generated sparky dialogue between accordion and pipa, while the closing number, by Rajoub, saw his soprano sax floating elegantly over strings as well as some further accordion pyrotechnics
This wasn’t mere pan-cultural shoehorning but lyrical and often dazzling collaborative music-making.
JIM GILCHRIST
MUSIC
William Barton ★★★★
The Hub
The didgeridoo is a generally underappreciated instrument in the western world. Indigenous Australian musician William Barton set out to showcase its versatility to a hall full of those eager to be enlightened. He made his arresting entrance from the back of the room, exploiting the acoustics with a soulfully modulated a cappella “chant of the earth” before tapping on the wood of one of three didgeridoos in contrasting keys. Curt bass notes became longer and pacier, like animalistic bellows, and he exhibited mighty lungpower with one long drone.
His tribute to time signatures, 7/8 Not too Late, combined a chugging train-like quality with a sustained drone, like an instrumental take on throat singing. Barton is also a storyteller, pressing the audience into service for elemental sound effects, as well as a magnetic guitarist, combining light touch fingerstyle playing with live didgeridoo and choral samples, plus own mouth music, and whipping up a storm of simultaneous strumming and puffing on Didgefusion.
Barton complemented a respect for tradition with enthusiastic advocacy and playful experimentation, rounding off an engaging set by duetting with Glasgow-based Australian bagpiper Bede Paterson, who added dramatic vibrato to their twin drones, creating an intense and thrilling combo.
FIONA SHEPHERD
MUSIC
Up Late With Joep Beving & Maarten Vos ★★★
The Hub
Dutch musicians Joep Beving and Maarten Vos may have been Up Late at the EIF but their collaboration was more soothing nightcap than social whirl, with those audience members reclining on beanbags enjoying the optimum experience of their ambient classical reverie.
Their main set was a eulogy for a friend inspired, Beving explained, by the crepuscular “blue hour” and the grey line between life and death. He opened with pacific synthesizer chords before switching to piano. Limpid sonorous notes were accompanied by a sensation of synth drone from Vos who helmed an array of electronic playthings, creating a theremin-like sound via modular synthesizer but also playing what looked like a theremin with a steady bow, which he then applied lightly (or should that be darkly?) to cello.
Beving’s minimalist piano playing occasionally strayed into Youtube study soundtrack territory but some of the melodies were truly beautiful, while his electronic keyboard passages allowed for more baroque stylings. All was sensitivity apart from one (relatively) loud chord. Their first encore piece was more involved, insistent and interesting, with Vos gradually ramping up the volume to mildly stimulating levels before they closed with a delicate duet on cello and piano.
FIONA SHEPHERD
MUSIC
Leonidas Kavakos & The Apollon Ensemble ★★★★
Queen’s Hall
Single-composer ‘completist’ programmes were all the rage a couple of decades back, playing into something of a must-catch-them-all mentality to music programming. There’s probably a simple reason why they quietly faded away: too much of the same thing.
That was always the danger, too, in the otherwise thrilling, sometimes challenging, always profoundly involving survey of four Bach violin concertos from Leonidas Kavakos and his six-man Apollon Ensemble, which brought the International Festival’s Queen’s Hall recitals to a glowing close. This was the two authentic concertos that still exist, plus two reconstructions – BWV1056R and BWV1052R – reverse engineered from harpsichord concertos.
Kavakos’s playing was bold, strongly articulated, forcefully projected throughout, with deeply considered arguments and a winning mix of period purity and expressive freedom, from the arrestingly stabbing chords that opened the E major Concerto to the muscular expressiveness of the A minor Concerto’s slow movement. His backing players were effectively co-soloists, conjuring a remarkable richness and depth of sound, and a gloriously fluid suppleness. What to play as an encore? Only one possibility, really: festival director Nicola Benedetti, who’d already introduced the concert, joined Kavakos and his ensemble for a limpid, heartfelt slow movement from Bach’s Double Violin Concerto. It was a concert of big emotions and exceptional playing, but too much of the same thing? A bit.
DAVID KETTLE
MUSIC
Master Musicians with Peirani and Segal ★★★★
The Hub
Making a welcome return to the Festival, and this year marking the foundation’s 25th anniversary, the Aga Khan Master Musicians, drawing on Islamic musical cultures across the Middle East and Asia, presented a characteristically richly toned and inventive amalgam of instrumentalists. One this occasion, however, returning luminaries – Wu Man on the pipa or Chinese lute, soprano saxophonist Basel Rajoub, Feras Charestan on qanun – the Persian plucked zither and Yurdal Tokcan on oud, the Arabic lute – were joined by two French guests, formidable accordionist Vincent Peirani and eclectically-minded cellist Vincent Segal.
Between them they created a glowing tapestry of timbres and textures, the brighter-toned strings of zither and pipa contrasting with the reedy voices of saxophone and diatonic button accordion, as in their opening number, which developed into a circus-like swirl.
A composition of Charestan’s opened with plangent cello deliberations joined by zither chimes before merging into a stately, haunting melody, Wu’s Dance of the Yi generated sparky dialogue between accordion and pipa, while the closing number, by Rajoub, saw his soprano sax floating elegantly over strings as well as some further accordion pyrotechnics.
This wasn’t mere pan-cultural shoehorning but lyrical and often dazzling collaborative music-making.
JIM GILCHRIST
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