EIF: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Edinburgh Academy Junior School
A great night in the big tent.
It was my first night in the big tent at the Edinburgh Academy Junior School, earlier concerts having been covered by my EMR colleagues, and I was impressed! Firstly with the ambience: the lush surroundings of Edinburgh Academy were certainly more impressive than the urban surroundings of my junior school in Kilmarnock back in the 1950s.The big tent is also really impressive in its scale, holding over 600 socially distanced seats, it’s over 200 metres long and very high, and it was full for this concert with the BBC Scottish Symphony. I did admittedly wonder how much people at the back would see of the orchestra on the stage, maybe binoculars should be carried. The weather was also benign, a gentle summer breeze with sunshine greeted us in the sylvan settings of the Academy, although it did get a little chillier later. Always wrap up warm for outdoor concerts!
The BBC Scottish looked pretty impressive, over 60 strong when they came on to the big stage at the big tent, which was much better lit than the smaller tent in the Old Quad. The orchestra was conducted by Marin Alsop, who at 64 must now be regarded as a veteran, though with lots of youthful vigour still on the podium. Edinburgh audiences are very familiar with Marin Alsop, not just because of her many visits to the Festival, but her time as a guest conductor of the RSNO. She didn’t disappoint us tonight.
The music began with a short work ‘Strum’ by New York composer Jessie Montgomery. “Do you think it’s plinky plonky?” asked a nearby audience member, using a term I often use for modern music without melody. Fortunately it wasn’t ‘plinky plonky’ but had definite melody after the pizzicato opening by the strings (hence the title ‘Strum’) and showed influences of American folk music. It was a pleasant opener for the concert. It was followed by ‘A Spell of Green Corn’ by Orcadian and adopted Scots composer Peter Maxwell Davies. This was inspired by the Orkney tradition of a fiddler blessing the fields with tunes before they are ploughed for planting. So the work began with a lovely violin solo by the orchestra leader evoking the folk traditions of Orkney fiddlers, but then goes into musical evocations of different seasons in Orkney and a final celebration for the harvest. Finally Marin Alsop led the orchestra into a wonderful, spirited account of Beethoven’s, and maybe classical music’s, greatest symphony: the Fifth. This work is very familiar to all concert goers and its opening bars to almost everyone, yet its music never palls and in the great expanse of the big tent it excited us not least because of the amplified sound of the overhead speakers. The work got a really warm response from the sold-out crowd, and we went into the evening shadows of Inverleith uplifted as great music only can. This was a great concert in the big tent!
