EIF: Philharmonia Chamber Players
Queen’s Hall - 06/08/22
A melodic opening concert but to a half empty hall.
This was the opening concert of the Edinburgh Festival. Normally on a Saturday morning it would have been a very full hall, yet the Queens Hall was a little over half full. We were not short of warnings to Fergus Linehan, the festival director, that raising concert prices and stopping the discounts for most pensioners would adversely impact on attendance figures. It’s not just for the opening concert but the story is that there are very few sold-out concerts during the festival and even the operas have lots of seats available. Fergus has claimed that Edinburgh is cheaper than many European festivals, which is true but that’s because they are often very expensive. Edinburgh is in danger of becoming a similarly elite festival for the better off, in comparison with for instance the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden where you can get upper slips tickets for £10. This compares with £32 for the cheapest upper circle seat for ‘Russalka’ at Edinburgh.
The Philharmonia Players are drawn from the Philharmonia Orchestra so you can be sure they are very good players and so it proved in this lovely opening concert. The concert began with perhaps the only ‘Scottish’ music in the festival, assuming you count Hans Gal, who fled to Scotland from the Nazis, as a Scottish composer. Hans Gal was also one of the founders of the Edinburgh Festival in 1947 so it’s good to see him celebrated at this 75th festival. The music itself was wonderful, an opening solo from the viola led into a lovely dark movement; the second movement had a great sense of humour and brought a round of applause from the audience and the final movement which began darkly ended up with a humorous march at the end which again brought a warm response from the audience. Let us have more Gal at the festival.
The second work at the concert was Strauss’s ‘Metamorphosen’’, originally written for a chamber orchestra and here arranged for a string septet by Rudolf Leopold. Strauss was very depressed at the end of the war and this dark brooding intense work reflects that gloom, but it is wonderful music. The final work was a Nonet (a work for nine instruments including wind players) by a nineteenth century French woman composer, Louise Farrenc, whose work has been largely ignored until the recent focus on women composers. It was pleasant, though sounding more a Viennese than a French composition, but it wasn’t outstanding and sometimes there is a non-discriminatory reason why works are neglected historically.
So the festival has begun, and the Queens Hall is back at the centre of it, with new improved chairs in the stalls and new uni-gender toilets upstairs. It has lost some of its intimacy along with the nice first floor café but will remain at the core of the festival until our new concert hall opens in 2025. For those who can’t make it and for those who can’t afford them, all the weekday concerts will be broadcast live on Radio 3 with Scotland’s Donald Macleod and Kate Molleson introducing them.
Cover photo: Andrew Perry
