BBC SSO - The Opening Concert

Usher Hall

Michael Tumelty

Five Stars

LET’S get the heart right out on the old sleeve and go straight for the jugular before I wheel out another barrel load of clichés. The opening concert of the Edinburgh International Festival on Saturday night was not the busiest I have seen. Why not? Well, it wasn’t the sexiest programme on the calendar to start with. Donald Runnicles programmed two choral rarities by Brahms to open the night, marking 50 years of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. Despite adding a few choral sweeteners in the form of a clutch of the much-loved L iebeslieder Waltzes, these two pieces gave a tough, serious feel to the launch concert. But that in fact was its strength. These two pieces ARE tough, serious pieces, and doing stuff like this is the business of festivals; apart from which, the Schicksalsied, which I don’t think I’ve heard before in concert, contain some of the most beautiful music that has come my way, and upon which the chorus lavished some of its warmest, most ravishing tone.

And thereafter, it was down to Donald Runnicles and the SSO in a stonking performance of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, whose central solo violin part was played heroically by leader Laura Samuel in the face of the Tattoo fireworks, which seemed to have re-synchronised themselves in time with the Usher Hall event. At the core of Strauss’s autobiographical extravaganza, which some folk see as hot air, lies a fantastically-unified and integrated symphonic poem. And that, at high voltage, is what Runnicles and his BBC battalion delivered on Saturday. It was outstanding.