Barbara Morrison - Up Close and Personal, The Outhouse Rob adams ***** Having one of the world's top jazz singers in residence for the Fringe's duration is a coup in itself, but getting to hear Barbara Morrison at work in a space not much bigger than the living room of a standard Edinburgh flat has to be the treat of all August treats.
It means you're that much closer to the incorrigible Miss M's good-natured impudence and you might get hauled out of your seat to dance a watusi, but it also means appreciating just how closely she interacts with her utterly made-to-measure trio and how jazz singing at this level really is "in the moment".
Nothing's routine and everything's sung like she's either been there or at the very least, means it. She sings the blues as if sharing her hurt will produce a cure, appropriates Stevie Wonder's All in Love is Fair with fabulous resignation and delivers Shiny Stockings as both a starry-eyed prom girl and the trombone player whose scarily accurate solo she impersonates.
She also has a great line in salty jokes but you'll have to hear those for yourself. It won't be a chore.
Ends August 29.
Bournville Young Singers, St Andrew's & St George's Rob Adams *** This mostly teenage choir ranges far and wide for its repertoire, delivering Native American chants, Nigerian and Zulu songs, as well as familiar TV themes and more technically challenging items with, the odd nervous wobble aside, confidence, enthusiasm and a pleasing sound.
Well aware that, for a visiting English group, The Eriskay Love Lilt could become The Risky Love Lilt, they pressed on and produced a creditable performance. Their arrangements are very good, some adding witty piano accompaniments, finger snaps, claps and a chocolo, and while Fringe veterans may quail at the inclusion of Sting's Fields of (Flippin') Gold, it's charmingly sung. So, too, the more involved Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, from Tennyson's The Princess, set to music by Alexander l'Estrange, which highlighted the choir's depth of technical resources with a light and thoroughly attractive touch.
Ends today. Another Place, Greenside Rob Adams ** < Dave Thomas's love affair with Yann Tiersen's accordion score for Amelie may have won him 10 million Youtube hits but he should beware that film music without the onscreen action can sometimes need something extra, such as expression. So it is here that Thomas, who makes the bold assertion that far too few composers are using traditional instruments (this'll be news to organisers of the Distil project), renders Tiersen's and his own compositions as largely finger exercises for accordion and piano.
His Brazil, inspired by the people, culture and what it's like to be there, might equally have been inspired by Basildon. While another item began promisingly with Thomas shaking the accordion's bellows, it fell into a general pattern of lacking real compositional development and the sort of substance that comes as standard with, say, Richard Galliano or Kimmo Pohjonen.
Ends August 29. Alexander's Feast, Canongate Kirk Conrad Wilson **** Stealing a march on Judas Maccabaeus, the vocal and instrumental forces of Edinburgh's Ludus Baroque brought Alexander's Feast to Canongate Kirk three days ahead of the festival's official opening concert at the Usher Hall. Intentionally or otherwise, it seemed a neat piece of musical subversiveness, the warmth of Handel's celebratory ode brightly scaled to the intimacy of the church's light 17th-century surroundings.
For the occasion, conductor Richard Neville-Towle had recruited a glamorous line-up of soloists, with the sweet-toned Katharine Fuge, pride of the Monteverdi Choir, as star soprano. Michael Chance, Ed Lyon and William Berger, respectively romantic, incisive and theatrical, completed the solo quartet, to which the 15 luminous voices of the chorus and timbres of the small orchestra added their own special glow.
Though less of a rarity than it once was - and though the bass's biting revenge aria lost its da capo - the music made a captivating impression. Instrumental soloists, not least the expressive cellist, seized their chances. As the light gradually faded beyond the church's clear glass windows, trumpets and drums exploded in part two.
Fringe music at its best, as this certainly was, can bring its own exuberant dimension to the Edinburgh Festival.
