Festival Music
Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh
Mary Brennan
four stars
THROUGHOUT August, the Edinburgh International Festival has been carrying a bold and genuinely enlightening torch for William Shakespeare – this year being the 400th anniversary of his death. As a finale to the EIF programme, the Fireworks Concert delivered a pyrotechnic salute to the bard, by featuring music inspired by his tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. As soon as the first swaggering surges of Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights rose skywards, they were met by a similarly grandiose display of lofty fire-power exploding overhead into bright-glowing sparks like gold-dust. Suddenly, the star-crossed lovers were being transformed into star-bursts that cascaded across the night sky while the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (SCO) – conducted (for the first time at this event) by Kristiina Poska – revealed the light and shade in the composer’s ballet score.
If there was a fine sense of drama in the Prokofiev, there was unstinting mettle and pzazz when the band hit the streets of down-town New York for Bernstein’s West Side Story. As the Sharks confronted the Jets, volleys of hurtling brilliance – oppositional in flares of red and green – leapt from the Castle battlements and the SCO blared out the strutting, wheedling rhythms that would never bend to a happy ending for Tony and Maria. Could the Pyrovision team capture, in fireworks, the wistfulness of Somewhere or the ache of I have a love? For the former, they set alight white flames, like beacons of hope, on the Castle walls, for the latter – well, the waterfall of silvery flickers coursing down the rock-face was like a veil of tears. There were final flurries of colourful whizz-wizardry – some thunderous, some swooshing, some crackling – to match Shostakovich’s Festive Overture with its roistering fanfares. The SCO rocketed through it with a razzle-dazzle all their own.
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