Throughout this year's festival I'll be getting out and about and keeping an online diary, to give you a flavour of what's happening on the streets and in the venues of Edinburgh. You can also hear my audio diary and interviews with performers from the Queen's Hall series during the Radio 3 broadcasts.
A profound calm comes over the city of Edinburgh in the final week of the Festival. All but the International Festival pack up their wares and go home. The streets clear, the leaves start to turn, and although it's strangely depressing to see it so empty, Edinburgh breathes a sigh of relief to be back to normal.
But it's not exactly normal, because the International Festival powers on for one more week, and the main venues are still packed with extraordinary performances.
My own personal highlight of the final week was Mahler's 4th Symphony performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker under Rattle (last Thursday). It's a rarity to hear a good German orchestra playing Mahler; rarer still to hear arguably the best orchestra in the world bring a familiar symphony to a whole new level of vibrant clarity. I've heard the Philharmoniker on home turf several times, always dazzling in Bartok or Ravel. But this Mahler had a depth to it I've not heard in their playing before. The orchestra moves as one organism, playing immaculately, at points tender and subtle, and always physically arresting. Watching the strings in the first movement was like following a slow-motion lacrosse match - the first violins caressing the tongue-in-cheek Viennese theme, then tossing it from the ends of their bows, and grinning as the seconds caught it, cradled it, and played on. At moments of intense quiet in the third movement, the packed Usher Hall fell completely silent, breath held, and released in a collective gasp at the beauty of what came next. As the third movement slowed to a close, the lights came on. Of course, there was a practical purpose (to be able to read the text of Lisa Milne's vocal line in the fourth movement) - but it was so powerful as a moment of transfiguration that I'd have believed anyone who said they'd seen the finger of God inching through the ceiling of the Usher Hall. I walked home on air.
In St Cecilia's Hall on the Cowgate on Saturday, another moving concert, but of the other extreme. David McGuinness (harpsichord) and David Greenberg (Cape Breton fiddler) of Concerto Caledonia took us back to the drawing rooms of 18 th century Scotland, and managed to do so without making us feel as though we were going backwards at all. Always relevant and contemporary, they played a Bach violin sonata as though they'd made it up on the spot, and old Scots tunes so catchy it's a wonder they're not topping the charts today. David Greenberg (like so many musicians this festival affected by the new airport baggage restrictions, using a borrowed fiddle) played with great delicacy - achingly beautiful at its quietest, terrifyingly virtuosic at its height.
Saturday's finale was a concert performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürmberg in the Usher Hall. As it was his last stand as Artistic Director of EIF, Brian McMaster rallied the troops, a glittering line-up of stars new (Toby Spence, Jonas Kaufmann) and old (John Shirley-Quirke as one of a host of celeb-Meistersingers). Best of all was Robert Holl's humorous, moving and human portrayal of Hans Sachs - (he was at the Queens Hall the week before singing Dichterliebe!) Another reminder of what McMaster's brought to Edinburgh over the years - opera in concert performance, not entirely obvious, but as engaging at the end of the festival as Elektra was at the start.
And then on Sunday the Fireworks concert brought the whole thing to an almighty crashing finale - to the SCO's Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev), the famous waterfall of fire cascaded from the walls of Edinburgh castle and heart-shaped flames of red filled the skies. The end of the Edinburgh Festival 2006, and farewell to Brian McMaster.
I hope you had a chance to hear some of the Queens Hall lunchtime broadcasts on Radio 3 - and there's more still over the coming weeks: two more Performance on 3 concerts from the same Queens Hall series, plus the mightly Beethoven and Bruckner complete symphonies cycle. Have a look at the listings on this website - and keep listening!
Monday 29 August
Stuart McRae's The Assassin Tree premiered last week, an International Festival production woven from several artistic strands - libretto by poet Simon Armitage, music by Stuart McRae, staging and choreography by Emio Greco and Pieter C Scholten. The plot centres on the goddess Diana, and her golden bough. Its leaves can emancipate any slave who plucks them; consequently, the tree is guarded by Diana's priestly bouncer. He has lost patience with his lot: his life is spent looking over his shoulder, because anyone who kills him automatically becomes the next priest, and many have it in for him.
This production was a real delight: fantastically committed singing (especially Gillian Keith's Diana), and great, great playing from Britten Sinfonia under Garry Walker. Emio Greco's elegantly abstract leaps and spasms were mesmerising, as usual, as were the calligraphies his feet traced on the floor after dipping his feet in water. Stuart McRae's score was dynamic and expressive, and worked like opera in reverse, beginning with the dynamic climax and ending in silence. The twist in the plot was revealed in a touching a capella duet between tenor and baritone. Above all, it was uplifting to see such total conviction and commitment behind a new work.
The Assassin Tree is an hour long. Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa , on the other hand, lasts for 3 hours 45 minutes with two intervals - no mean feat in a festival city of hour-long slots, where audiences get tetchy if you over-run by 5 minutes.
Mazeppa is the grey-haired hetman (ruler) of the Ukraine . When he defies convention and marries his goddaughter, the 18-year-old daughter Maria, her father, Kotchoubey, seeks revenge. Tchaikovsky apparently had difficulties sympathising with the arrogant Mazeppa and foolish Maria; even so, he managed to write a convincingly epic opera about them. By the end, Mazeppa is a wretched fugitive, Maria is broken and mad, Andre (Maria's childhood friend) lies dying in her arms, and Kotchoubey is no more than a bloodied head on a stake.
Peter Stein's production has us in a parched Ukranian landscape, Cossacks huddling together in a tent of oriental rugs. Outside, two dancers display competitive bravura, dipping themselves up and down, legs flying in all directions. When Mazeppa arrives in the town square to witness Kotchoubey's execution, he enters on a real live horse. As the axes fall and Maria runs in (too late), she is confronted by her father's severed head raised high above the crowd.
Tchaikovksy's score is similarly bold - gripping orchestral writing in the overture and the battle scene. The Russian singers were all fabulous, but for me the most powerful performance was from Anatoli Kotscherga as Kotchoubey - his Fidelio moment (a song of brave despair, shackled and tortured in Mazeppa's dungeons) was deeply moving, clearly a character with whom Tchaikovksy had no trouble finding sympathy. And nobody, I might add, was looking at their watch.
Friday 25 August
There's a gem of an exhibition at St Cecilia's Hall in the Cowgate. Violin Making in Scotland 1750-1950 is a wonderfully simple display of string instruments. Philip Schreiber, luthier and German immigrant to Glasgow, was interred on the Isle of Mann during the First World War. While there, he made a palm-sized miniature string quartet - a most touching sight.
Came across a fictional violin at the Book Festival yesterday morning. Writer Claire Kilroy read a lovely tale of a young Irish violinist, living in New York , who does an under-the-coat deal in Central Park with a Russian criminal, and comes away owning a Stradivarius. We should all be so lucky!
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My celebrity spots so far: International Booker Prize winner Ismail Kadare, and Max from Neighbours. You really do see it all in Edinburgh!
Thursday 24 August
Had my second festival encounter with hip-hop last night, an altogether more enlightening one than the first. The papers reported almost 50 people walking out of the first night of H2, a new work by Brazilian choreographer Bruno Beltrão and his Grupo de Rua de Niterói. The EIF spokeswoman seemed to have the right idea: this is a good sign. Art is about provoking people.
Well, I can guarantee that only a small fraction of last night's audience turned up expecting art. They wanted entertainment - an hour of feisty, gritty, "real" Brazilian street dance. The bafflement in the auditorium was palpable. Provocation is almost an understatement: H2 was profoundly uncomfortable.
An opening blast of hip-hop (three young men dancing to a witty mix of The Flight of the Bumblebee ) gave way to a deafening silence, and a painfully slow deconstruction of hip-hop. When the beat is gone, what is left? The answer is a piece of dance theatre that dared to ask what it means to be human. One by one, more dancers appeared, flinging themselves into backwards sprints, colliding in slow motion, playing out their relationships in a kind of jerky Capoiera. Most importantly, they avoided eye contact throughout. When the "street" finally sprang to life in the final moments, all that discomfort remained. Hip-hop, I realise, is a lot more than entertainment.
Fringe comedy, on the other hand, can quite easily be neither art nor entertainment. Jim Jeffries ( The Second Coming ) is a very rude man. The Underbelly air was heavy with rising damp and the beer warm, and I'm not particularly well disposed towards comedy. When I've paid someone to make me laugh, I almost never do. But I was pleasantly surprised: although none of his material was inherently funny, Jeffries had me in stitches.
Still, it was bound to end badly. "I hate women", he said, once we'd reached the home stretch. Apparently, enough female comics get away with saying "I hate men", so why shouldn't he say it back? Fair enough, Jim - thing is, they're not particularly funny either.
Tuesday 22 August
I have the feeling that my late grandmother would have fared rather better in festival Edinburgh than myself (despite her occasional tendency towards cultural apathy), for three reasons.
One: She believed in practical shoes. Wellies have become de rigeur festival footwear since the heavens opened most ungraciously last Friday. Plus, with such a tiny city centre to navigate, it seems a bit extravagant to be taking cabs from one venue to another, so you need a thick and comfortable sole.
Two: In line with a street safety campaign that ran while I was at primary school, she was always ready to remind me: "It's OK to say No!" This is not only useful when faced with strangers offering sweets, but also comes in handy when three Edinburgh shows you ought to see start at the same time, and all you really want to do is sleep.
Three: She always seemed to have a bundle of vegetable crudités wrapped in cling-film to hand. It's very easy to eat nothing but caramel shortcakes and deep-fried, well, everything, during the festival. (Clearly this is a perennial problem in Edinburgh , but definitely exacerbated by the rush of festival life.) My grandmother was great at proverbs. Here's mine: a handful of carrot sticks in the bag is worth two in the fridge.
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It's been several days of mayhem and festival diversity since my last entry. I've been battling the crowds on the Royal Mile with all the confident violence of a Londoner - not something I'm used to having to do in a city that, outside of the festival, is all calm and eye contact.
Started the day on Sunday firmly on Scottish soil with Alexander McCall Smith at the Book Festival. We talked about his home city of Edinburgh . He's best known as the literary celebrity of 44 Scotland Street and No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency fame; renowned too as the founder of the RTO (Really Terrible Orchestra, an Edinburgh institution of amateur proportions). But he's also the Billy Connolly of Morningside: he has that same knack of laughing so infectiously at his own jokes before they're finished that you can't help but join in!
From Scotland to India on Monday night - and a wonderful convergence of the Odissi and Bharatanatyam classical dance forms of north and south India , under the canopy of stars that is the Royal Lyceum Theatre's dome. This is what an international festival is all about.
On several recommendations I ventured Into the Hoods this afternoon, to see the "contemporary" re-working of Into the Woods by the ZooNation dance troupe. Feted in London , they performed here in the darkened insides of an upside down purple cow. Some truly phenomenal dancers, in particular the grinning, balletic Spinderella, but an abundance of slapstick comedy left me craving more show-off solos. If not for the 21 st century cultural references to iPods and the hit TV-series 24 , I'd have thought myself back in the '80s watching cult east end sitcom Desmond's and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air . Still, it went down a treat, and nice to see plenty of youngsters turning out in the afternoon. Savvy, savvy?
Sunday 20 August
Our first week of Queens Hall lunchtime broadcasts is over, but still two more to go, starting on Tuesday... Will I survive the pace? Not if I go to three concerts a day, as I did yesterday!
At 5.30pm, Sir Charles Mackerras and the SCO took Beethoven's 5 th Symphony at quite a lick, but it was a splendid performance. It confirmed my long-held and possibly un-cool opinion of Beethoven: that his sound world is both seriously weird and always unexpected. Despite having heard this symphony hundreds of times, the SCO and Mackerras kept me guessing throughout - real edge-of-your-seat stuff.
Bruckner's 3 rd Symphony at 9.30pm was, by comparison, a massive romp. Completely lacking in subtlety, it was nevertheless done great justice by the RSNO and Günther Herbig. The other end of the spectrum from Beethoven, where the power seems to me to be inherent in his musical material. With Bruckner, it's the orchestra itself that packs the punches. I left it feeling very energised, but gasping for a gin and tonic.
Sandwiched between the Symphonies at 7.30pm was Schubert's Trout Quintet, rendered crystal clear by the Hebrides Ensemble and Llyr Williams, the pianist who made such an impact in his first Queens Hall recital a few years ago. His limpid tone and exquisite phrasing of Schubert's melodious piano writing coaxed sterling performances from his fellow musicians.
This new approach is (as I've said before in this diary), a great innovation in concert going from the Edinburgh International Festival, especially cheap at the price of £10 a gig or £25 for all three. Refreshing to hear familiar and unfamiliar works without the clutter of other music to wade through. All in all, it was a wonderful and varied 5 hours' experience, one that invited me to listen in a whole new way (and graze furiously in between). Well worth it once in a while but not necessarily to be recommended on a daily basis!
Friday 18 August
My one great pearl of festival wisdom so far: pace yourself! Still more than two weeks to go, and I'm already burning out. Had to take the night off yesterday to catch up on sleep. I need to conserve my energy for the triple-whammy concert experience tomorrow: Beethoven Symphony, Masterworks Series and Bruckner Symphony from 5.30 till after 10.00pm.
Branching out from International Festival fare to a broader range of Fringe and Book Festival events is a good way to balance the humours. On Wednesday night, saw a wonderful set at the Spiegeltent by Moishe's Bagel. Klezmer by name, but an Edinburgh-based quintet who are by no means stuck in the Shtetl. There's a bit of double-bass flamenco, jazz piano and tabla thrown in. Frenetic fiddler Greg Lawson (also moonlighting this festival with the SCO in their Beethoven symphony cycle) has a folksy edge to his Pagannini antics - a great gig all round.
Discovered an ingenious new way to diet: Wake up to Words at the Book festival. At 10.15 this morning, two Scottish writers read their short stories over coffee. Ewan Morrison's engaging tale of middle-aged adultery was hard enough to stomach that early on. What really did it, though, was Laura Hird's brilliantly crafted short monologue of a 17-year-old coming out to his father on a fishing trip. A lamb dies a violent, bloody death, so minutely detailed in gore that it put me right off my breakfast!
Wednesday 16 August
The sight of the RSNO spread out penguin style across the broad sweep of the Usher Hall stage, and Jane Irwin before them, robed in gold, was a touching and familiar one. It reminded me of the cover of an old LP my parents had: Kathleen Ferrier's famous Edinburgh festival appearance - the same grand bowed stage, the same comely soloist stance. It occurred to me that in one sense, the Edinburgh International Festival hasn't changed at all in its 60 years.
At the same time, last night's performance of Das Lied von der Erde was progress indeed - part of the Masterworks series that are sandwiched as separate concerts between the complete Beethoven and Bruckner symphonies over 9 nights at this year's EIF. Concerts with just one piece on the programme are a rarity, especially at 7.30pm - but such a wonderful way to hear music. I was talking with Cedric Tiberghien earlier today, the Radio 3 New Generation Artist who makes his EIF debut tomorrow at the Queens Hall (broadcast on Radio 3 this Friday), and he drew an interesting parallel between culinary planning and concert programming. The Masterworks Series, then, is like eating one medium sized pizza and leaving out the starter and dessert. How to present music is a real issue now more than ever - Matt Fretton's This Isn't For You classical club nights last year in Shoreditch Town Hall were an admirable example of experimenting with new concert formats. And in a very different and rather more subtle way, over the years Brian McMaster's been experimenting too, without getting anywhere near the unhelpful issue of "dumbing down". I particularly remember the £5 Nights series a few years ago as a brilliant draw to younger Fringe audiences, and this year McMaster's done it again, with yet another new idea.
This morning Soile Isokoski gave a fantastic Queens Hall recital that goes out tomorrow lunchtime (Thursday, 1pm). The warmth of her relationship with her pianist Marita Viitasalo was a joy to behold.
Made my first trip to the Edinburgh International Book Festival this afternoon to hear Jane Glover and Anthony Holden in conversation. An engaging discussion about Mozart (Jane Glover's recently published a study of the women in his life, now in paperback) - and his relationship with the fascinating da Ponte, whose biography Holden has just brought out. You couldn't make this up: da Ponte was a Jewish-born Catholic priest, who got expelled from both Venice and Vienna for sexual misconduct, befriended Casanova, married an Englishwoman called Nancy , and ended up teaching Italian students in what is now Columbia University in the USA. An astonishing life, and one that reads not unlike the blurb on a Fringe flyer!
Tuesday 15 August
Recorded our first lunchtime concert yesterday, at the grand opening of the Queens Hall Series. Pianist Steven Osborne has an ambitious project this year - the complete Preludes of Debussy and Rachmaninov over two concerts. This was the first instalment, and goes out as the Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert today at 1 o'clock - do tune in!
Steven feels completely at home in the Queen's Hall. A local, he performed here in school concerts while a student at St Mary's Music School, When we met up on Monday, it was clear that he has a great affection for the space and its acoustic. His relationship with the Edinburgh International Festival audience, who've seen him in recital since 1992, is also very warm. Onstage he is honest and direct - a great calm and integrity about his presence. But he's also capable of fireworks, and got inspiringly physical in the Rachmaninov. He continues with the second instalment of the cycle (Debussy Book 2 and Rachmaninov opus.32) next Wednesday, and you can hear it at 1 o'clock on the Friday (25 th August) on Radio 3.
Proof later on in the afternoon that while the festival is all about fun, Edinburgh takes itself and its festival status seriously. A Fringe panel discussion, in conjunction with the Napier University, addressed the question: What future for festivals? - in the context of the struggle between cultural integrity and political interference. Actually, it turned out that political indifference was more an issue. The panel, of arts festival professionals (with a theatre bias) posed some interesting questions (but answered few). Paul Gudgen, Artistic Director of the Fringe, in the audience, suggested there's been a rise in political theatre over the past few years, and wondered where this might lead...
...Right back to Brecht, I'd say. "My name is Bertold Brecht, and I am a playwright" - thus began a stunning Weill/Brecht double bill with François Girard directing the Opera National de Lyon. The Lindbergh Flight / The Flight Over the Ocean is a cantata about first the solo Atlantic flight in 1927 by American aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh. Although quite a static performance, it was visually arresting, a row of clock-faces, keeping international time, hung suspended above Lindbergh's slow-moving aircraft. The complexity of the hero's status is revealed as Brecht demands that Lindbergh's name be erased because of his Nazi activity. Particularly chilling in light of The Plot Against America, Philip Roth's dystopian fantasy in which Lindbergh beats FDR in the 1942 election, and begins dragging the USA towards a fascist future.
The best bit, though, was The Seven Deadly Sins - superbly brash singing from Gun-Brit Barkmin as Annas I and II. She and her dancing sins pranced across the stage with bright pink hair and white trouser suits as the family back home, a quartet of men leered at each other around a conference table, stuffing bank notes down their pants. It's an astonishing score, terrifying in its indictment of complex human morality. This is political theatre at its most subtle and its most powerful.
Monday 14 August
The Edinburgh International Festival burst onto an already buzzing city yesterday. Just back in town from a month at the Proms, I spent most of the day adjusting to the festival pace and atmosphere. Producer Peter Meanwell and I interviewed pianist Steven Osborne at the Queens Hall café, in advance of his opening recital, and then headed out to the Meadows, where Fringe Sunday was in full swing. A free, open-air event, with short slots showcasing performances in scheduled tents, and general circus mayhem all around. Edinburgh locals, performers and tourists crowded onto the Meadows to the north of the city centre. In a queue for the portaloos, I came face to face with the diversity of the festival - children with painted faces, grown men in orange bodysuits, Capoeira dancers desperate for a pee...
And here's the thing about this festival - one minute you're in amongst a mayhem of burlesque exhibitionism and tarot-reading - and the next, you're taking a velvet seat at the Usher Hall for a concert performance of Strauss' Electra. It was a triumphant start to Brian McMaster's last year as Artistic Director of EIF. From the opening punch to its reiteration at the tragic climax, there was no let-up (nor was there an interval - a refreshing format). Edward Gardner, this year's operatic wunderkind, directed proceedings with great commitment and lucidity, and the RSNO exceeded expectations, capable of power without losing momentum. But the night belonged to the soloists. Leandra Overmann was terrifying - a rasping, snarling Klytemnestra you'd rather not meet in a dark alley. Silvana Dussmann arrived onstage looking like a mittel-Europa housewife, yet her penetratingly clear Chrysothemis (the only one singing from memory, and all the more authoritative for it), almost stole the show. But Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet was a marvellous Electra. By the end of the evening, she'd lost her mind and an earring (I think it must have sensed the terror and fled the earlobe) - the audience had lost no more than six of its more fragile members - and the rest of us had gained unimaginably. On the EIF website, there's a clip of Brian McMaster saying he hopes that each festival performance will have a transforming effect on someone in the audience. Well, this did it for me - and it's only day one.
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