EIF: Exploring Mendelssohn at the Hub
The Hub - 10/08/23
Stefan Jackiw, Sterling Elliot, Jessica Bodner, and students
‘Community over chaos’ is the theme of the first week of EIF events at the Hub, part of Nicola Benedetti’s attempt to review the role of the Festival, crystallised in her use of the quote from Martin Luther King, “Where do we go from here?” Does it succeed in doing this? Or is it perhaps reinventing the wheel?
The central attraction of this event was Mendelssohn’s lovely octet, written when he was 16 and one of the most joyous works in chamber music. However before that we spent 40 minutes hearing the stories of five students who would play along with 3 professionals. The students were chosen after an open audition and not surprisingly were very good students indeed, often at the end of their training and at the beginning of their career. This presumably exemplifies Nicola’s project to rethink the Festival and to involve the community, although it must be said the community in this case is the international music community because there wasn’t one Scottish student among the students. Now it’s not that Nicola doesn’t know about Scottish music students, as over the years she has done excellent work with them. Also although getting to play in the festival will be good for their CV’s, it’s not the first time that these students or most music students at Conservatoires have played with professional musicians. This is a normal part of music training and I have seen and indeed reviewed these concerts in Glasgow and Edinburgh. I’ve no doubt similar exercises occur in other music centres. So is this a real innovation, or just a repackaging of common musical practice to broaden the scope of the Festival?
The other role of the Hub concerts is to make the Hub a welcoming, relaxing place, a home for the Festival. It’s true that the comfortable chairs are very nice but I estimate that this cuts the number of spaces available for spectators by approximately half. The Hub used to be a big performance space with 500 seats: now it’s a small comfortable space for about 200 people. Another ‘innovation’ - at the beginning of the concert a festival staff member in welcoming the audience said to the effect, “Don’t worry about wandering in and out for a drink during the event”. Several people took that advice. Is that really what we want to encourage in our concert audiences? The Hub used to have a very good cafe downstairs where you could meet, eat, drink and talk about the Festival. That has disappeared and has been taken over as a canteen for festival staff. The only public bar upstairs is a rather small characterless bar. Is this making the Hub a more welcoming place? It also raises questions about the impact of the Hub on the festival finances, a point made in its annual report.
These reservations apart, it was a pleasant concert. The professional musicians were the excellent performers at the opening Queens Hall concert: violinist, Stefan Jackiw, Jessica Bodner, viola, and Sterling Elliot, cello. The students were Anaïs Feller (violin), Letizia Gullino (violin), Alexandra Peral (violin), Susie Wanshu Qiu (viola) and Maxim Calver (cello). Stefan played a Mozart Duo with one student, and Jessica a Dvorak Terzetto with two others, and Stefan chatted to the students about the nature of chamber music and their own musical experience. This was followed by Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat major, Op 20. This octet in four movements was written by Mendelssohn at the age of 16 in 1825 and is an early example of chamber music and a very early example of an octet. It is a much-loved youthful masterpiece and as such an ideal vehicle for this very talented group of students, and it was a delight to see how seriously and joyously they played. So did it work as an exercise? Did it break the mould for conventional concerts? I don’t think so. To end on a slightly churlish note, I also noticed that it certainly wasn’t sold out, but then at £25 a ticket for one advertised 40 minute work, maybe Edinburgh concert-goers are more critical than the festival gives them credit for.
Cover photo: Andrew Perry
