EVERY year, once we hit July, my mind starts to leap-frog a bit. The period embracing late July and just around the corner into August is given over to the summer activities of the three National Youth Orchestras of Scotland, one of the most crucial times for the finest of the country’s young musicians: a real showcase, about which more very soon. And then the music calendar plunges headlong into August and the Edinburgh International Festival, which always seems to contain wall-to-wall musical events, until you look more closely: for the second year there is no daily concert series in Greyfriars Kirk, a venue that not only came into its own in an earlier festival regime, but became something of a cache, with fearless and inquisitive audiences queuing around the perimeter of the Kirk to buy tickets. Nor does there appear to have been any attempt to follow-through from last year’s Beethoven Piano Sonatas cycle in the unfamiliar venue of the Playfair Library, which would have been more of an interesting challenge than apparently just closing the door on it. Ah, the disposable society in action.
Then, once the squibs, sparklers and rockets have fizzled out at Edinburgh Castle, before you know it, we’ll be nosing up to the autumn and winter seasons again, with the national orchestras falling over themselves to get in on the action. The BBC SSO is heading off early with its season, to get ahead of the crush. Before you hock yourself up to the eyeballs in expensive concert tickets, however, take a look around to see what else is on offer, and where. In particular, take another look east and see what’s on in Edinburgh on Sunday afternoons. And let’s assume that, by the beginning of October, we’ll have a restored rail link between Glasgow and Edinburgh, one that goes through tunnels instead of its current scenic tour of Glasgow’s housing schemes.
Over the years, the Usher Hall has had a few goes at transforming itself from being merely a receiving house for orchestras in the classical arena of its operations into something more resembling a promotional body. There was an attempt around 2004 which didn’t come to anything: there seemed to be neither strategy nor resources. It was scratchy and patchy. Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, around that period, had an established International Classical Season with visiting artists. Then, towards the end of the first decade of this century, the Usher Hall ran into another hiatus when the building underwent renovation and the construction of a new add-on extension. That took some two years and unearthed problems at the foundations of the building. All, eventually, was fixed.
But the hall needed an opportunity, an occurrence or an event to let Edinburgh kick-start a new era for the Usher Hall as its own promoting house. About five years ago Glasgow handed it to them with a change of artistic policy that sent its own promotions moving on a different scale and in different directions, from chamber music to choral music. What Glasgow did not want any more of, ran the policy, was visiting orchestras: the city already had effectively three resident orchestras. Suddenly, there was a gap. Nobody, within the two cities’ autumn/winter seasons, was receiving visiting international orchestras.
Edinburgh moved like lightning and pounced like a cheetah. Suddenly, there was a new series at the Usher Hall on Sunday afternoons at 3pm. It was called Sunday Classics: International Concert Season. There is not the slightest doubt that what occurred was an astute exercise in promotional opportunism. I know because I asked. The long, patient and sometimes painful process of cultivating a concert season and growing an audience began. There have been a few blips, but I sense a confidence growing steadily through the organisation. And if you take a look at the line-up they have assembled for next season you'll see it yourself.
They’re opening on October 2 with Stephane Deneve and his Brussels Philharmonic. They’ve not been here. They’re bringing Beethoven’s Pastoral and that quintessential roof-raiser, Respighi’s Pines of Rome. Later that month, the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra and Fedoseyev will bring an all-Tchaikovsky programme with the Fifth Symphony and Jennifer Pike playing the Violin Concerto. Then guitarist Milos arrives, with the Royal Northern Sinfonia and his Bach to Beatles programme, before the Czech National Symphony with Natalie Klein playing Shostakovich One followed by Dvorak’s New World. Alison Balsom will play Hummel with the Zurich Chamber before joining the amazing Gabriela Montero in Shostakovich’s Double Concerto. As well as the Kremerata Baltica, there will be a stupendous event with the St Petersburg Phil, John Lill and Yuri Temirkanov all on stage at once. Ye Gods: what a stonker of a season.
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