Usher corridor (two stars); Queen’s corridor (four stars),Edinburgh
Audience attention waned during the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s performance of Schumann’s Manfred, but Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s trio concert was rivetingHere’s a dismal statistic. The entire classical music programme of the 2016 Edinburgh international festival – 41 concerts, and three operas contains works by just eight living composers (that includes re-arrangements) and one woman (that’s Alma Mahler,dead since 1964). The ratio seems about a century out of area. Two years ago, the festival added a strand of pop and folk music under the promising heading “contemporary” and I got excited that classical audiences might hear some fresh stuff – even that the notion of “classical audience” versus any other kind of audience might genuinely start to blur into irrelevance. Instead, and we’ve been packed off to a museum full of lovely obsolete things with the message that “contemporary” and “classical are destined for two different stages. A particularly fusty (moldy, musty, old-fashioned) experience came via John Eliot Gardiner and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a complete performance of Schumann’s Manfred. This is Byron’s epic poem with incidental music for orchestra,chorus and soloists – a broodingly and profoundly tedious hour of romantic uber-angst, and we had narrator Wolfram Koch reclining neurotically on a chaise long at the front of the Usher corridor stage to drive domestic the point. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com