Edinburgh International Festival music reviews: Carmen | St Matthew Passion | First Night at the Hub

Edinburgh Festival Theatre, until 8 August

★★★★

Not every detail in director Andreas Homoki’s conceptual vision of Bizet’s Carmen falls perfectly into place, but by ripping the storybook Spanish setting out of this popular French opera and turning it in on itself, he reveals something more fundamentally challenging, truthful and revealing about its fretful characters.

This is a production conceived for Paris’s Opéra-Comique (in association with Zurich Opera), where the work was premiered in 1875, and which Homoki has literally adopted as it’s location. That’s something you need to establish for yourself, but what is obvious from Paul Zoller’s set design - an unshifting representation of a theatre’s innards from austere rear-sited public area to the foreground electricity of a stage-within-a-stage - is that this Carmen is more about the opera’s universal relevance, our contemporary reaction, than its setting. 

The central issues remain unspoilt, the action systematically travelling through time. From a 19th-century starting point, the smugglers morph into 20th-century French Resistance, the later bullfight inciting a modern-day rave. Then the cataclysmic impact of the final scene, Don José's storybook murder of Carmen reeking more horrifyingly of domestic abuse.

All of which turns a refreshing spotlight on the protagonists. Foremost is Gaëlle Arquez’s Carmen, forcefully uncompromising, darkly fascinating, her supreme performance enriched by a voice that probes the essence of unflinching self-belief. Saimir Pirgu’s Don José is a powerful foil, his big moments shaking the rafters, heedless to the imploring sincerity of Elbenita Kajtazi’s Micaëla. 

Jean-Fernand Setti’s Escamillo looks every bit the part - toweringly brutish - yet his blustery delivery on opening night was unsettled. Despite some rocky moments, too, from the adult and children’s choruses, their alluring intimacy was insightful. Under conductor Louis Langrée appreciative musical direction the SCO uncover gems of often unheard detail in this golden score.

Ken Walton

Opening Concert: St Matthew Passion

Usher Hall

★★★★

What is a festival for, if not to present the wonderful, the unexpected, the curious. So, in a fastidiously researched new edition, we encountered the young Mendelssohn- to whom we owe a great deal thanks to his Bach obsession - embarking on rigorous and dazzling explorations of the Baroque.

At a mere 20, Bach's great St Matthew Passion from 1727 must have stretched Mendelssohn's precocity to extremes in a new century with a new explicitly lyrical approach to orchestral and choral sounds, pitches, punctuation, and, indeed, listeners' expectations.

In 2024, we may be celebrating uniting rituals, but the extraordinary and at times bewitching sounds of an iconic work reworked with great love, detail and its young devotee's emotional language worked a strange miasma.

Long slurred phrases with sophisticated shapes, four flutes like mating birdsong, a fine chorus singing as if a ruling mob, and soloists - all early music heroes - here singing true to Mendelssohnian ecstasy. We were in safe hands.

Ed Lyon's Evangelist was fervent, sensitive: a fine storyteller. Neal Davies's Jesus, beautifully sung, seemed wearied, scarred with over-raw experience. The female voices varied between dramatic and pure. One longed, occasionally, for more spontaneity, more sense of sudden fright at shocking events. Pilate, dark and doomy, sounded tremendous.

The glorious chorus, as though living every startling moment, seemed braced to leap from their seats and intervene. The BBCSSO, a fine orchestra with Ryan Wigglesworth its masterly, musicianly conductor, brought detail, discipline, elegant solos and a sensitivity from every corner, as strings divided to colour and shape.

Only the sudden soft clunk of the fortepiano startled in recitative, as though the instrument had strayed in from a concert elsewhere. But whether Bach or Mendelssohn, the excoriating pain of the Passion, in today's world, carries the same indelible impact.

Mary Miller

First Night at the Hub

The Hub, Edinburgh

★★★★

Posh carpets, comfy seats, and atmospheric lighting created the ideal atmosphere for the first of the Hub sessions. Rituals that unite us, the festival theme, underpinned performances by a diverse and stellar line-up led by EIF director and violinist Nicola Benedetti.

The Schola Cantorum de Venezuela set energy levels high with Vivian Tabbush’s La Chapparita while three members of the Orquesta La Pasión continued the dance rhythms with a humorous merengue, Gang Gang Can Can.

Playing his new fretless sarod for the first time, Soumik Datta’s hypnotic raga Rituals of Rain made the damp stuff sound magical. It chimed with the emotional crisis Beethoven articulates in his ‘Ghost’ trio, superbly played by the Leonore Piano Trio. Dame Sarah Connolly echoed this mournful mood in her superb rendition of Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. 

The final set was led by the Grit Orchestra’s brilliant Greg Lawson, who also arranged the music for everyone to join in, demonstrating the power of music to transcend all boundaries. Benedetti began with Jay Ungers’s beautiful waltz, Ashokan Farewell, followed by Burn’s A Man’s A Man for a’ that, a traditional Galician tune and a rollicking set of Scottish reels to finish.  

Susan Nickalls

Schola Cantorum de Venezuela

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh 

★★★★

In introducing yesterday’s EIF morning concert, Schola Cantorum’s commanding, yet effervescent, director, Maria Guinand, spoke of the power of music – and especially singing – in conveying hope for the future. As a reflection of the Festival’s theme of Rituals That Unite Us, it was a strong message.

Reinforcing her words, the 17 singers who have come to Scotland as representatives of the choir, not only brought the natural, fresh energy of their voices, but dancing, movement, percussion, all colourfully woven together to tell the stories of the music with captivating commitment and conviction. Performing everything from memory, the first half was rooted in sacred music.

While the theatricals could at times be distracting, there was no questioning the depth of meaning brought to the texts, especially in Scottish choral favourite O Radiant Dawn by James MacMillan, sung with exceptionally moving reverence and humility.

A second half of almost all Latin American composers brought rituals right to the fore in Canadian R Murray Schaefer’s Magic Songs. A series of chants linked to nature, they became more showy style over substance, the onstage action being much better suited to the rhythmically.

Carol Main