Music

To her evident delight and surprise, Kathryn Joseph has become a left-of-centre fixture since winning the Scottish Album of the Year Award in 2015 with her debut album, Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled. But there was something different about her biggest hometown show to date – instead of eyeballing the audience side-on from her battered upright piano, she played a grand piano more fitting to the elegant opulence of the City Halls.

“IT’S the first night of our tour, and this is a good place to start,” mused Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig with a hint of understatement, as the packed-out Edinburgh crowd jumped for ever-more-feverish joy before his band. Vampire Weekend have been away for six years – or at least, that’s been the gap between their 2013 third album Modern Vampires of the City and this year’s follow-up Father of the Bride – and their fans appear to have remained loyally by their side.

Right now, we need Billy Bragg more than ever. He can’t single-handedly rescue the weary and dispossessed, but he can remind us that we’re neither beaten nor alone. During this defiant solo show – the first of three consecutive nights at this intimate converted church – he cherry-picked material from across his career.

That this was the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s first season concert featuring London-born, Edinburgh-educated, New York-based Anna Clyne as associate composer almost overshadowed the fact that it was the remarkable Finnish violinist/conductor Pekka Kuusisto’s second as featured artist. No concert featuring Kuusisto can fail to convey his huge musical personality, though, and with the SCO it was there in abundance. His opening Beethoven Creatures of Prometheus Overture was rugged and gutsy, directed with vigour from the violin, and he injected a similar vigour and vim into Mozart’s lightweight but charming K136 Divertimento. To close, his Haydn “Il distratto” Symphony was simply superb – brisk, biting, boldly characterised, and with its copious musical jokes (a sudden spate of tuning up, or violins seeming to forget why they were there) played deliciously straight, and as a result genuinely funny.

Sonica, Glasgow’s lovingly leftfield festival of audio-visual art and performance, celebrates its fifth edition with its most varied programme to date, including this absorbing pop-up satellite show in Greenock’s 19th century Tobacco Warehouse.

‘Of course it would have been easier to play Dvořák’s New World Symphony, which the orchestra can do with its eyes closed.” Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen is considering the many challenges of performing Mahler’s massive Third Symphony, which he directs with the Prague Symphony Orchestra at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on 10 November, stop four in the ensemble’s seven-concert tour of the UK.

The Alhambra Theatre in Dunfermline has hosted many magical nights since it re-opened.

A Dalkeith man’s traditional Scottish dance band has been shortlisted for a national award and he now hopes locals back them in a public vote.

Underworld’s trademark rhythms run through their Drift Series, while Jeff Goldblum’s jazz project thrives on collaborations

It took little more than a throwaway upbeat to the opening excerpts from Delibes’ ballet Sylvia, ou La nymphe de Diane, for the RSNO’s conductor laureate Neeme Järvi to recall the magic the now 82-year-old once brought us as music director in the 1980s.

Who’d have thought a piece of spinning string could be so unutterably beautiful? It was that, strung between floor and ceiling in Tramway’s cavernous main hall, that provided the focus for Italian artist Michela Pelusio’s mesmerising SpaceTime Helix (*****), one of the high points in the opening weekend of the Glasgow-wide Sonica festival of visual/sonic art. In her infinitessimal adjustments of light, colour, sound vibrations and velocity, Pelusio captured the string in weird curving patterns, or seemed to create semi-solid, kaleidoscopic towering objects, deformed by bits of rag she casually threw into its vortex. It seemed to embody all that Sonica is about: a harnessing of technology and the simple physics of sound and vision to beguiling artistic ends, at once playfully captivating and intellectually provocative.

Having taught himself to play guitar from YouTube tutorials, 13-year-old singer songwriter Connor Fyfe is now a promising artist from Bellshill  in Glasgow. Over the past two years he’s achieved a great deal, playing The Barrowlands, King Tut’s and an impressive 20 festivals this year alone, including the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Party at The Palace, Youthbeatz and Butefest.

A Hebridean band who have gone from playing in bars to selling out the Barrowlands in the space of a year and a Gaelic choir's bid for Eurovision glory are in the running for major music industry awards.

Susan Dalgety meets Lazarus, whose music has attracted the attention of Madonna and Wezi, who plans to turn the city of Mzuzu into the Milan of Africa.

WHILE Edinburgh Uni students prowled South Clerk Street dressed as walking corpses and blood-smeared vampires, inside the Queen’s Hall, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra devoted its Halloween to Czech sunshine, warmth and positivity. This was one of the ensemble’s most unashamedly joyful, upbeat concerts, propelled along with eager energy by Joseph Swensen, who seemed in his element in the blithe good spirits of Suk’s opening Serenade for Strings, elegantly shaping its aching melodies and building quite a passionate head of steam in its slow movement. Brisk and buoyant, it was a delight from start to finish – unchallenging, perhaps, but delivered with humour, high spirits and touching sincerity.

HEARTTHROB Montenegrin guitarist Miloš Karadaglić apologised to the Usher Hall audience for having to cancel his previous Edinburgh gig – back in 2016, at the same venue – because of a recurrent hand injury. But he was back on form, he assured us, and back in the capital to perform the same piece he’d been intending to play three years back: Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.

MARINA Diamandis’ solo show is a stadium spectacular on a budget, a collision of song, dance, visual effects and her own mature and very capable songwriting skills in concert hall form. This has the rather unusual effect of giving the star of the show a kind of down-to-earth modesty, even as she’s enacting a complex dance routine alongside her quartet of gender-fluid dancers against a video wall showing far-off landscapes.

LISA Stansfield’s current tour celebrates the 30th anniversary of her once ubiquitous debut album Affection. That, of course, gave birth to karaoke staple All Around The World, a deserved and appropriately globe-conquering hit (you could say it put her on the map, but I wouldn’t).