EIF reviews: The Magnetic Fields, Verdi Requiem and more

Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields at the Queen's Hall on Saturday | Andrew Perry

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The Magnetic Fields: Part One ****

Queen’s Hall 

Cult US band The Magnetic Fields have done the double at the EIF before, performing every track on concept album 50 Song Memoir over two nights in 2017. Seven years on, their task was even more humungous – delivering a comprehensive retrospective of their classic 69 Love Songs album to mark its 25th anniversary.   

Led by baritone bard Stephin Merritt, the five-piece launched into their chronological compendium with Absolutely Cuckoo, a jaunty duet with Shirley Simms, the desolate legato notes of I Don’t Believe in the Sun, and the droll indie country of A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off, with Merritt employing his bassiest register. Later, he brandished a triangle with intent on Tex Mex ballad The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be.   

All romantic life was here – old love, new love, toxic love, crazy love - captured in suitably diverse form, from rich, sophisticated indie symphonies to sharp 60-second vignettes. The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side and The Book of Love lingered longer and were received with bursting affection. Accompaniment ranged from finger clicks to cacophonous indie rock, from space age synth odyssey to a playful approximation of free jazz for Love Is Like Jazz (“you make it up as you go along”).

At times, the music was deliberately naïve but the lyrics and imagery were consistently poetic, insightful or dry as a bone - Grand Canyon was introduced as “a song about a gigantic hole in the ground.”  Merritt proposed a 22-hour intermission after one final song, Promises of Eternity, and it was a gem, evoking 1970s pop bubblegum melodrama. “Thanks” shouted someone at the back of the hall, drowned out in the bustle of a happy audience on their way home. And the best of it was that The Magnetic Fields had 34 more love songs good to go for Part Two. Fiona Shepherd

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Verdi Requiem *****

Usher Hall

Verdi’s Requiem, written in memory of the Italian humanist writer Alessandro Manzoni, broke liturgical convention in its era by being too operatic, including women’s voices, and giving prominence to complex, interweaving solos and duets. Such qualities render it ideal for concert performance, and it is has flourished in that context ever since.

Continuing their EIF residency, the Philharmonia Orchestra, under the baton of Santtu-Matias Rouvali, gave Verdi’s considerably elaborated setting of the Catholic funeral Mass an electrifying performance, teaming up with the ever-versatile Edinburgh Festival Chorus. Among the highlights of this organic account of grand scale memorialisation were the thunderous, repeated Dies Irae (one of Verdi’s best-known ‘bangers’), the double-fugue Sanctus, an intense Lux Aeterna, soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha’s soaring solo over the reworked Introit, and an impassioned final chorus.

Jennifer Johnston (mezzo), René Barbera (tenor) and Tarek Nazmi (bass) were also in fine voice, especially Johnston. They maintained presence in the midst of huge choral and orchestral power, yet without appearing to declaim.

Brahms famously defended this monumental work against sceptics by declaring that its innovations could “only be the work of a genius”. The Philharmonia and Festival Chorus did its moments of grandeur and introspection full justice. Simon Barrow

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Cätlin & Marko Mägi with Finlay MacDonald & Ali Hutton ****

The Hub

This engaging, pan-European colloquy of reed power united Scots piper Finlay MacDonald, along with Ali Hutton (also a piper but here accompanying on guitar), with the Estonian duo of Cätlin Mägi on the Estonian bagpipe or torupill and Marko Mägi on soprano saxophone.

The Estonians opened with a striking traditional calling tune, pipes and sax answering each other, before embarking on a further set, sax improvising sinuously over the torupill, with its dangling assembly of three horizontal drones. Cätlin continued with a buzzing, twanging excursion on jawharp before Marko joined her for a wildly trilling duet.

MacDonald and Hutton opened their set with Highland pipes, Finlay playing a Gaelic air then switching between low whistle and pipes for a march, reel and nimble-fingered jig.

Things really began to spark, however, when the Scots and Estonian artists combined, MacDonald switching between bellows-blown Lowland pipes and mellifluous whistle. Cätlin opened, once again, on jawharp, MacDonald joining for a fiery jig by the late Gordon Duncan, before guitar and sax added impetus to a fiercely whirling Estonian melody. Estonian and Scottish pipes voicing together as the ensemble spun on to an exuberant close. Jim Gilchrist

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Goitse ***

The Hub

Goitse – the name means “come in” – are a dynamic, tightly co-ordinated quintet from Ireland’s hotbed of traditional music, their front line of fiddle, banjo and occasional piano accordion propelled by guitar, piano and not least by champion bodhrán player Colm Phelan. They opened with a characteristically nimble set, Alan Reid’s banjo and Tadhg Ó Meachair on piano trading lines deftly with guitarist Conal O’Kane and fiddler Róisín Ryan (standing in for the band’s regular singer-fiddler Áine McGeeney on maternity leave).

That set the bar for their instrumentals, combining their own compositions with traditional, such as the dramatic drive of The Trusty Messenger reel set or the irresistible skip of a string of polkas, Ó Meachair switching between piano and accordion.

Ryan’s singing occasionally seemed slightly forced in the upper register, perhaps unnecessarily amplified for the size of venue. She included a hoary old favourite, Ireland’s Green Shore, and later the patriot ballad Henry Joy McCracken, recounted with feeling over empathetic piano and guitar, as well as the late Andy M Stewart’s Queen of Argyll.

A spectacularly dexterous bodhrán solo from Phelan was followed by further high-energy sets that concluded with a responsive audience on their feet. Jim Gilchrist