2025 Edinburgh Festival – A Personal View

2025 Edinburgh Festival – A Personal View

 -         and a sneak preview of the Lammermuir Festival

 In many ways, this was an unusual Festival for me. I have been attending the Edinburgh Festival as spectator, performer and reviewer ever since, as a schoolboy in the early 1970s, I discovered the music of Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler. My musical tastes before then were largely self-taught through records and word of mouth, and my short-lived obsessions included The Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, The Monkees, The Four Tops and The Carpenters, with some dollops of Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Sandi Shaw and Mary Hopkin thrown in. When my voice broke, and I discovered that, somehow, I had been given a bass voice which was better than anyone’s that I knew, it was Tom and Englebert who were my early heroes. Through the movies of Mario Lanza, I began to find out about classical music, and with the enlightened help of my music teacher, Richard Telfer, I became aware of the riches available in Edinburgh in August. He could get tickets for us, and also paid work selling programmes at the Assembly Hall on the Mound, where I was introduced to the theatre in the form of the Prospect Theatre Company – Timothy West’s King Lear being a notable revelation, along with Ravi Shankar’s late night Ragas.

Soon I was able to see Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Daniel Barenboim perform Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’, Giulini conduct Verdi’s Requiem, Bernstein conduct Mahler 2 and Claudio Abbado conduct Teresa Berganza and Placido Domingo in ‘Carmen’.

In 1980, I appeared in the Freemasons’ Hall in televised masterclasses with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. In 1982, I made my Scottish Opera and EIF debut in Puccini’s ‘Manon Lescaut’, conducted by Sir Alexander Gibson, and subsequently in ‘The Jolly Beggars’ by Burns, directed by Frank Dunlop.

My career took me far from home but returning to live in Murrayfield with my family in 1997, I have been a frequent attendee of the Festival, and have put on my own recitals each year since 2001.

 Since 2020, I have been reviewing the Festival for the Edinburgh Music Review, and after establishing my credentials, I offer a few thoughts on my experience of 2025.

It was billed as an interim Festival due to the lack of Government funding, and my own attendance has been sporadic, due to a medical condition, preparation for my own concert on 16th August, and the necessity to get out of town when Oasis came to Murrayfield.

Nonetheless, I can declare that my experience of the Festival was overwhelmingly positive, and that  a couple of shows were fabulous. There are serious omissions in my reviewing – most of the Queen’s Hall concerts, the 8 hour ‘Veil of the Temple’ by John Tavener, the Vaughan Williams Sea Symphony, and the Gluck ‘Orpheus and Euridice’ in the Playhouse – but these have been covered by other EMR reviewers.

A few caveats:

I am not at all comfortable with the mottos, slogans and guiding mantras which we have had plastered over each of the last two Festivals. ‘The Truth we Seek’ is an airy-fairy vision, which is largely meaningless in an artistic process, and I could do without such statements as ‘This Festival reminded us why we gather, why we create and why we believe.’ Most people are coming to hear great music played live by consummate musicians. That has always been the epicentre of the EIF, and that has kept us coming all these years. Quirky theatre and unusual dance or physical performances are a useful addition, but the core remans the Queen’s Hall and Usher Hall music programme. The play about the RBS debacle starring Brian Cox, was enjoyable and very well-attended, but seemed out on a limb.

I’m afraid the programme situation is almost as bad as last year. The free sheet idea is good, but the content was feeble in the extreme. It seems to me imperative that the EIF hires someone, or a team, who have some concept of classical music, and what an audience needs to know. This year we had the basics of the major performers and the programme of the event, but almost nothing about the music we were hearing. Four sides were given up to sponsors names, a ‘welcome,’ a bit about the Festival and that was largely it. At least three or four sides should have been about the music. Most people like to follow the programme and the music during the performance, and not wander off at the end (or before) to look things up on the internet.

The audience age is coming down a lot, but there is still a huge core audience who don’t immediately rush for their phones to surf the net.

I’ll leave it to one of my colleagues to discuss the merits of the pricing system, but from this punter’s limited view, it seems to have been successful, in that everything I saw was sold out. There’s something special about a concert hall or theatre which is full, and the EIF must have been pretty satisfied with the general attendances. Even while we have challenged the pricing system in the past, one must acknowledge that the ticket prices, although not cheap, are much cheaper than equivalent festivals throughout Europe, like Salzburg, Aix-en-Provence or Glyndebourne.

The experiment with beanbags, started last year, seems to have been well-received, although clearly not ideal, or even possible, for many concert goers of my generation. The appearance of the Aurora Orchestra, playing from memory, and marvellously mingling with the audience in their encore, was an absolute triumph, and, although not possible for most concerts, it is surely a way forward. The sight of the RSNO in the closing concert in full evening dress, with white tie and tails for the men, did seem anachronistic in 2025. Formal evening wear for our Edwardian ancestors is surely unnecessary nowadays, and I think it is positively alienating for a younger audience. I myself always wear a simple black shirt and black trousers for my concerts these days, and I would encourage orchestras to do the same.

Even in a year when funding was short, Nicola Benedetti and her team have come up with an extremely good programme of high quality, and we must hope that when full funding resumes, she can even top this quality of performance.

I went to two or three Fringe concerts and stagings, and again found the quality to be extremely high. My own recital of operatic gems was well-supported by over 230 people in the New Town Church, demonstrating that you can find high quality music on the Fringe too. It is an ongoing sadness that the Scotsman newspaper, while exemplary in its coverage of comedy and theatre (often of execrable standard) refuses to review any Fringe classical music at all, and thank goodness for the EMR, who at least have made an attempt to cover some work. I’d love to see the EIF reaching out to the many excellent musicians who use the Fringe as a launch pad for new music and new artists. Some sort of publicity assistance could be arranged without too much effort or expense?

 The next cultural event available to Edinburgh audiences is the ever exciting Lammermuir Festival, which has just started in East Lothian and promises to be every bit as good this year as last. EMR is offering a pretty comprehensive coverage of this excellent small festival, and we hope you enjoy our reporting. It’s a wide ranging programme this year, including Monteverdi’s fabulous Vespers (Sunday September 6th), Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues played by Hannes Minnaar (9th and 10th September at 10.15 by candlelight), a rare chance in Gosford House on Friday 12th September to hear the extraordinary claviorganum (a combined organ and harpsichord in one instrument), Schubert’s sublime string Quintet (Saturday 13th September), a Baroque extravaganza with Concerto Italiano (Sunday 14th September) and a staged version of the recently reconstructed Markus Passion of J S Bach, played by the Dunedin Consort under