The bizarre if often serendipitous coincidences that seem to strike at the selection of subjects for this column took a flyer to themselves over the Easter weekend.
I had just completed a series of email exchanges with Jo Carpenter, a PR person with whom I have frequent correspondence, which led to the decision to devote this space to pianist Peter Donohoe, a superlative musician seen far too infrequently in Scotland these days.
I was putting the finishing touches to my thinking before writing the piece over the weekend when, on Saturday, in a brief respite from domestic duties, I decided to check my emails and start writing the Donohoe piece. Up flashed a message from the Usher Hall announcing its 2013/14 International Classical Season, which opens in October. The season, marking the centenary of the Usher Hall, is being spearheaded by the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio, and the programme features Rachmaninov's Paganini Variations. Guess who the piano soloist will be? Peter Donohoe, no less.
I then looked at the content of the rest of the season and promptly changed tack for this column. There's a strong reason to devote space to Donohoe, but it can wait a week because there is some absolutely spectacular stuff in the Usher Hall's new series; and as that six-concert international season is just being announced, it's more important to get it done first.
Two weeks and a day after the Moscow/Donohoe launch concert, Stephane Deneve brings his Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra to Edinburgh with a performance of Mahler's colossal Sixth Symphony: I bet they'll stream from Glasgow for the return of the big Frenchman with that programme. Then on November 20 Leif Ove Andsnes and the supreme Mahler Chamber Orchestra come to the Usher Hall with a programme including Beethoven's Second and Third Piano Concertos, in which Andsnes will be both soloist and director. And here's another wee coincidence: it's only in late February that I reviewed Volume One in the Andsnes/Mahler CO team's Beethoven Journey, a project to record all five piano concertos for Sony. Now here they come, live, to Edinburgh. Does it get any better? Yes; emphatically.
In mid-December, Harry Christophers and his great vocal ensemble, The Sixteen, will bring a succulent programme of choral music by Francis Poulenc and Benjamin Britten to the capital. They will be followed in January by the glorious Academy of St Martin in the Fields, led (of course) from the front of the orchestra by star violinist Joshua Bell. And that, as regular readers might have spotted, is the third coincidence which gave me a jolt as I shifted column subject for today: it's two weeks to the day since I gave this space, albeit in a slightly different context, to Joshua Bell and his great, conductor-less orchestra which has just produced its first team-recording of Beethoven's Fourth and Seventh Symphonies.
Think about all this for a moment. With Deneve and his Germans, Andsnes and his Mahler CO, Bell and his Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields all doing big things and all coming to Edinburgh's International Classical season, while the great Donohoe has something big and imminent in the pipeline, it tells us something: somebody at the Usher Hall is doing something very right. Moreover, somebody in that organisation has their finger on the pulse of what's going on in the music business.
It's a fabulous season, and I'm not quite done yet. The new international concert season will culminate in March 2014 with a huge all-Beethoven programme from the Vienna Tonkunstler Orchestra with conductor Andres Orozco Estrada and yet another somewhat neglected pianist, Barry Douglas. The programme will feature performances of Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth (Pastoral) Symphonies, while Douglas will play the Fourth Piano Concerto and the rather ramshackle but entertaining Choral Fantasy.
Tickets for the Usher Hall International Classical Season are on sale from April 15, www.usherhall.co.uk
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