EIF: Cécile McLorin Salvant in Concert
Usher Hall - 07/08/23
It wasn’t my thing so I left!
It’s not often a critic begins a review with a statement like that above, but I believe it’s a critic’s right to leave if they really can’t stand it. Last November in Berlin I walked out of a new production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle which was a truly awful production and called for the founding of a new organisation called SPOC (the Society for Protection of Critics). Its fundamental principle is that critics have the right to leave a performance if they are finding it painful. When Cecile destroyed my favourite Brecht\Weill song, ‘Pirate Jenny’, I thought it was time to go. I did enquire whether there was an interval but was told it went on non-stop from 7.30 till 9.15 pm. I left at 8.30; I’d had enough to write a review and don’t believe she would change too much in the last hour.
Firstly a question. Should jazz be a central part of the Edinburgh International Festival? After all we have just had a very good jazz festival with lots of international stars. I’m sure Cecile would have fitted in fine there, indeed I suspect there were quite a few jazz festival fans in the audience whooping for Cecile. The Festival was of course founded on opera in 1947 and sadly we have no fully staged operas this festival although some interesting concert performances. It was also built on classical music and occasionally on Scottish traditional music since one of the Festival’s mission statements is to show the best of Scottish culture to the world. It’s true occasional singers who cover jazz have been present in the Festival, but jazz has never had a central role. Maybe that’s one of the things that Nicola wants to change and it’s significant that her Festival question “Where do we go from here?” came from Martin Luther King. It’s also significant that the great jazz trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis was in a discussion group in the Hub this afternoon and talking about the importance of music in the fight against racism in the USA. So maybe jazz is going to become more central in the Festival, although I have to say it seems to be partly at the expense of Scottish traditional music which was heavily featured two years ago and seems to have disappeared. Still a new Festival Director has the right to take a new direction, but critics also have the right, indeed obligation, to be critical.
So if you are going to have jazz at the centre of the Festival, is Cecile McLorin Salvant the right person to be there? She is a very established international star and Grammy award winner and did perform ‘Ogresse’, a jazz theatrical parable about a monster the other night, getting a favourable review from Kate Calder in the Edinburgh Music Review. I have no doubt that Cecile has a very good voice; it has a great range and colour and is a very powerful instrument. What I object to is her interpretation of the music. Every song she tackles she totally reinterprets in her unique style sometimes so much so that you don’t recognise the original. I have listened to jazz greats in the past, from Ella Fitzgerald in Glasgow in 1959, through Billie Holiday, Cleo Laine and indeed last night Cleo’s daughter, Jacqui Dankworth, in Edinburgh. All of them were great singers and all of them interpret great songs in their own way but none of them totally reinterpret the songs in the way Cecile does, making them almost unrecognisable from the original. Most of the time she gets away with it; she has great voice and stage presence and a group of accompanists who are clearly at her disposal. However when she destroyed ‘Pirate Jenny’, the great Brecht/Weill song from ‘The Threepenny Opera’, it was a step too far for me. This song has a particular style relevant to the work; in Cecile’s interpretation it became a self-indulgent parody of the song. It will be interesting to see the Berliner Ensemble’s version of the song next week. I suspect even the radical producer Barry Kosky won’t destroy the song in the way that Cecile did tonight.
So I invoked the SPOC principle and left. I had seen and heard enough to know that I didn’t like it. Some other people left too – I don’t know why - but the majority stayed and seemed to be enjoying it. Was I right to leave before the end? I think so, I was hating it and I didn’t think she was going to change. Does that mean I’m right? No, aesthetics are subjective and critics can be in a minority, and, whisper it, can be wrong. But they also have rights and I exercised my right to vote with my feet.
