Edinburgh International Festival’s jazz and classical music audiences will have to set their satnavs for different coordinates this year.
With the exception of the familiar Festival Theatre, where Scottish Opera perform a four-night run of Verdi’s riotous Falstaff, it’s all change venue-wise due to social distancing requirements.
So instead of the Hub at the top of the Royal Mile, jazz aficionados will get their fix way out west at Edinburgh Park and instead of the Usher Hall for the big concerts and the Queen’s Hall for the more intimate chamber music events, classical music will be staged in pop-up venues at Edinburgh Academy Junior School and the Old College Quad on South Bridge.
A varied programme
Locations aside, the 2021 edition of Edinburgh International Festival presents the kind of high-quality programme, balancing known quantities with a fearless sense of adventure, for which it has become known around the world.
Among the works new to the festival is Dido’s Ghost, which incorporates Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas but takes the story onto its next phase.
Its composer, Errollyn Wallen has enjoyed a startlingly varied career, from playing challenging contemporary piano music to performing pop and jazz inspired songs.
Dido’s Ghost
Now a professor of composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, she wrote Dido’s Ghost at her home in the lighthouse at Strathy Point, in Sutherland, and has experienced some ups and downs in its two previous performances as leading singers had to withdraw and her bass guitarist’s part had to be covered by the string section when he was Track and Traced. Consequently, she says, the piece is built to endure.
Dido’s Ghost is at Edinburgh Academy Junior School, where violinist Nicola Benedetti will be giving two of the three performances in her residency.
The Ayrshire-born virtuoso directs her own baroque orchestra and stars in Stravinski’s The Soldier’s Tale here and presents The Story of the Violin at the Old College Quad.
Among other attractions at the school are the energetic Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov playing a programme of Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko and an opening concert on 7th August with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under its current principal guest conductor from Finland, Dalia Stasevska.
Ethnically-diverse orchestra
The Old College Quad programme features the chamber ensemble from Europe’s first majority-Black and ethnically diverse orchestra, the Chineke! Orchestra in a pairing of Vaughan Williams and Coleridge-Taylor (the full orchestra features in the premiere of a new work from cellist Ayanna Witter-Johnson at Edinburgh Academy). Dutch fortepianist Ronald Brautigam open the programme playing piano trios by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, described by The Strad magazine as “the most exciting violinist in the world,” partners the zestfully spontaneous Turkish pianist Fazil Say, playing Schubert, Brahms and Janáček. American superstar soprano Renée Fleming performs lieder and songs by Handel, Fauré and Strauss with her regular accompanist, German pianist Hartmut Höll, and Linlithgow’s contribution to world class piano performance, Steven Osborne criss-crosses the centuries in a programme of Beethoven, Schubert, Sir Michael Tippett and George Crumb.
Vibrant jazz scene
The jazz element brings some of the best examples from London’s currently vibrant and exciting scene, with drummer Moses Boyd – a visitor to Edinburgh previously in his Mobo-winning partnership with saxophonist Binker Golding – unleashing the music from his debut solo album, Dark Matter. Here, the jazz tradition interacts with grime beats, funk grooves and elements of unashamed pop melodicism in music that’s liable to lift people out of their seats.
Saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings’ The Comet is Coming is an exuberant trio, with Max “Betamax” Hallett and synth player Dan “Danalogue” Leavers, that transports the culture of Hutchings’ Afro-Caribbean ancestors into the here and now – and possibly beyond. Science-fiction meets psychedelia meets Afrobeat in a no-holds-barred invitation to party.
And with the perfect timing you might expect from a group championing Afrobeat’s feelgood rhythms, Kokoroko arrive in Edinburgh with a shiny new Parliamentary Jazz Award for Jazz Ensemble of the Year to add to their Best Group title from at the Urban Music Awards last year. Led by trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey and featuring saxophone, trombone, guitar, keyboards, drums and percussion, the septet is on a mission to create new languages from Afrobeat, and to entertain royally.
