EIF music reviews: All Rise | Dunedin Consort - The Passion of Mary Magdalene

Opening Concert: All Rise ★★★★★

Usher Hall

If Gustav Mahler believed a symphony should embrace the whole world, then Wynton Marsalis clearly thinks even bigger: his First Symphony – better known as All Rise, which formed the International Festival’s grand and grandiose opening concert – embraced Mahler, Stravinsky, Dixieland jazz, John Williams, gospel hymns, Copland, salsa, New Orleans funerals, tango, a symphony orchestra (the RSNO, on very fine form), a huge chorus (the strong-voiced Edinburgh Festival Chorus, supplemented by the glorious Jason Max Ferdinand Singers), and a jazz band – in this case, the exceptional players of Jazz at Lincoln Center, of which Marsalis is musical director (he sat modestly in the middle, delivering a couple of fiery trumpet solos).

Excessive? Probably, but then excess felt like the order of the evening – and it was a thoroughly joyful, inclusive excess that brought the capacity audience to its feet in appreciation, and even for a spot of dancing. Marsalis seemed intent on reflecting nothing less than all of human musical and cultural history in his monumental, 12-movement jazz symphony, but its celebration of connection, solidarity and self-fulfillment felt like a clear cultural statement as the first flagship work in the International Festival’s American strand.

At times – certainly in the work’s opening movement, Jubal Step – Marsalis had so many layers of musical activity that it was impossible to take them all in. At other times – notably in the achingly beautiful a cappella close to movement eight, The Halls of Erudition and Scholarship – he boiled his music down to its emotional essence. Conductor James Gaffigan conveyed all of Marsalis’s wild and disparate invention, as well as marshalling the stage-filling forces, with confidence and utter conviction.

Okay, a few movements might have felt more like successions of vivid episodes than taut structures, but All Rise was a magnificent achievement, a fittingly spectacular kick-off for the Festival’s evening concerts, and as provocative and thought-provoking as it was inspirational and enriching. David Kettle

READ MORE: EIF Contemporary Music highlights: Jim Gilchrist on the 2026 programme

Dunedin Consort: Passion of Mary Magdalene ★★★★

Queen’s Hall

You’ve got to admire the sheer boldness of vision – not to say audacity – from the International Festival in launching its Queen’s Hall series with an unapologetically dissonant, uncompromising work, and one that offers a radical reappraisal of one of our civilisation’s foundational tales.

Tansy Davies’s Passion of Mary Magdalene won’t have been for everyone – indeed, there were a handful of walk-outs during a brief midpoint retune – but its sometimes piercing harmonies often felt like an astringent deep-clean for the ears, and it offered a bracing opportunity to experience Christ’s crucifixion from the perspective of one of the Bible’s most maligned but complex figures.

Much of its unsettling sonic novelty came courtesy of the period-instrument Dunedin Consort, supplemented with a 21st-century electric guitar: John Butt’s assured, incisive direction brought Davies’s twittering, chattering textures to vivid life, even if she relied quite heavily on setting up processes and letting them run.

Likewise, there was probably too much slow-moving incantation from the work’s two soloists, but both were quietly magnificent, Marcus Farnsworth as a commanding, even judgemental Christ, and an otherworldly Anna Denis soaring and plummeting through Mary’s angular declamations.

A furious battle between constellations marked the crucifixion itself, while an ecstatic aria showed Mary’s physical passion for Jesus. It was a work to prod and provoke, and to inspire, in a performance so committed and convincing it’s hard to imagine a finer one. David Kettle

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