Festival Music

Thank You, Edinburgh

Edinburgh Playhouse

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THE second of two overtures in the programme of crowd-pleasers that ended The Philadelphia Orchestra’s Edinburgh Festival residency offered a lesson in theatre acoustics to those who had heard the orchestra when they arrived. While Dvorak’s Carnival Overture sounded huge in the Usher Hall, the cavernous Playhouse swallows a symphony orchestra with ease.

Well-filled with those who had claimed a free ticket, and live-streamed to another audience in the sunshine at the Ross Bandstand in Princes Street Gardens, Saturday afternoon’s “Pops” concert was in a sense a replacement for the missing Fireworks Concert at the Festival’s end. From my seat in the stalls, The Philadelphia may have been quieter but the quality of the playing was just as fine, and particularly appreciable at close quarters.

As introduced by retiring Festival Director Fergus Linehan, and reiterated by conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin, the Thank-You of the title was not just to the citizens, visitors and supporters who had turned out for the 75th event, but more specifically to the carers, teachers, and delivery drivers who had gone the extra mile during the hiatus of the pandemic.

The orchestra has a new work in its book which it commissioned in 2020 to say exactly that. Valerie Coleman’s Seven O’Clock Shout – an instrumental song of praise to healthcare workers with some vocal cheering from the players at its climax – sounded less like Count Basie’s One O’Clock Jump and more like Aaron Copland, but sat well in what was a nicely-constructed programme.

It began with Rossini’s Overture to The Thieving Magpie and concluded with the closing movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, preceded by another new work, Fate Now Conquers by Carlos Simon. Also a little Copland-esque, it was drawn from a number of responses to the work of Beethoven written to sit alongside a cycle of the symphonies, and this swift tour through the American orchestra’s recent projects also found room for the “Juba Dance” third movement of Florence Price’s First Symphony, which the orchestra had played in the Usher Hall the previous evening.

Their recording of Price, as Nezet-Seguin cheerfully boasted, won the orchestra a Grammy, and at the heart of the afternoon’s music was another Grammy award-winner, soprano Angel Blue, whose selection of songs included Gershwin’s bluesy lullaby, Summertime, from that Porgy and Bess recording. It was bracketed by Harold Arlen’s Over the Rainbow from the Wizard of Oz and two of Puccini’s best-known arias, O Mio Babbino Caro from Gianni Schicchi, and Vissi d’arte from Tosca.

It was really only a cameo appearance by the opera singer, who was last on a main stage at the Festival in Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu almost a decade ago, but it won the most vociferous acclaim of the 75thFestival’s largest audience.