EIF: Stefan Jackiw & Friends
Queen’s Hall - 05/08/23
A challenging opening concert fails to pull in the crowds
Opening concerts are a very important part of the Edinburgh Festival. The main opening concert is of course in the Usher Hall on Saturday evening and, with a new work by Tan Dunn, ‘Buddha Passion’, it also promises to be a challenging opening concert and is sold out (see review to follow). However the opening concert of the Queens Hall morning series on Saturday morning was less of a crowd pleaser. Only 400 of the 900 seats were sold. This may have been partly due to the higher prices of the festival, but the Iestyn Davies concert on Monday at 11am is sold out, so it must be due firstly to the musicians, who although very good are not well-known in Scotland, but also the programme. It began with a James Macmillan work, followed by a Charles Ives composition, again not obvious crowd pullers. The concert finished after the interval with a Brahms piano quartet and, as one audience member put it to me at the interval, “after the first half I’m really looking forward to the Brahms”!
I talked to Nicola Benedetti at the interval about the problems of programming and she said of course you can’t always get people on the dates you want them, which is true, but arguably a bigger name would have given the festival a better send off.
Stefan Jackiw is a fine violinist of Korean and German heritage, born in Boston USA, and, as we learned in a nice voice message from Nicola and Tom Service of Radio 3 this morning, he is an old friend of Nicola’s. He was assisted by Orion Weiss, a good pianist from Ohio. Sterling Elliot, a recent graduate from the Juilliard, played the cello and Jessica Bodner is a viola player from Houston Texas. When they came together in the Brahms Quartet they showed themselves not only to be fine individual musicians but played really well as an ensemble.
The concert had opened after an introductory welcome by Nicola with a James Macmillan work ‘Before the Tryst’, composed in 2016. It is based on a poem by William Souter about a woman visiting her lover at night and departing just before dawn. In the programme notes Macmillan suggests that we can detect elements of folk song in the work and of course he began as a folk musician back in the 1980s. It was nice to see James Macmillan there to take a bow, and as I said to Nicola, it was good to see a Scottish composer opening the festival. However it is also true that some in the audience found the work challenging. This was followed by a Charles Ives piano trio originally written in 1910 but not premiered until 1948 after many rewrites. It’s a piece all about Yale, the college he went to, with lots of in jokes and cultural references. The second movement is headed TSIAJ, “This Scherzo is a Joke”! Maybe that’s why he delayed it so long before publication. It received a muted response from the small audience.
So the festival has begun, not with a bang but with good intentions. As Nicola said those that came will enjoy it and come back in future. Well maybe, but I suspect the opening evening concert at the Usher Hall will be a much livelier affair with a much bigger audience.
Cover photo: Sophie Zhai
