Edinburgh International Festival music reviews: Best of Monteverdi Choir | Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy

Usher Hall

An ensemble of soloists, some of whom featured at Saturday’s EIF opening, the new generation of Monteverdi Choir has a surprising, fresh and distinctly modern sound.

We are long past the somewhat over-manicured early music delivery mantras of the past: painstakingly enunciation and wowling phrases. These singers have formidable technique and pristine diction, and sing with open and unfettered joy.

Monday’s programme was tricky - its title Best of Monteverdi Choir was a challenge – and pitching Purcell with Johann Sebastian Bach and his remote cousin Christoph in the concert’s short first half didn’t always deliver absolute success.

Invigorating listening rather depended on the levels of woe in the texts and their settings, and the extent of the Lord’s redemption. Purcell sounded a little tentative before a Christoph Bach rarity sung so gently as to be almost whispered, demanding wispy discretion from English Baroque Soloists’ beautiful strings. JS Bach’s Singet dem Herrn then set off at spanking pace, and both choir and orchestra seemed to find their pace.

In Handel’s Dixit Dominus the young composer’s inebriation with all things Italian and operatic explodes into virtuosity with brilliant dialogue between voices and instruments. The texture, with matching violins and violas plus bass creates an ingenious match with the five strands of voices as equals.

The 22-year-old Handel was certainly out to prove himself to Rome’s diva strewn intellegentsia. Perhaps fueled by contemporary Papal disapproval of publicly played opera, florid cantatas were seeping into Church music encouraged by wealthy palazzo-owning clergy.

Handel, lover of word-painting, sets off, a fearless adventurer into a theatrical psalm of stern judgement swerving from wild pulsing choruses with stuttering repetitions to soloistic sweetness. Jonathan Sells, conducting a skittering tempo, gave us poise and agility.

As encore, JC Bach’s touching personal epilogue Gutte Nacht restored slow-breathed calm. We returned home serene and blessed.

Mary Miller

NYO2: Family Concert ★★★

Usher Hall

Now in its second year, the EIF’s Family Concert concept is a good thing. How to stage it, however, remains work in progress.

NYO2, a youth orchestra of almost 100 instrumentalists from Carnegie Hall New York’s trailblazing education programme, were ideal inspirational role models for any child present, audience numbers of which looked sadly depleted thanks to Storm Floris.

With lighter style breeziness in impressively agile playing, the performers’ joy in being part of the amazing phenomenon of what makes an orchestra was delightfully evident. Yet, a bitty programme of very short pieces with too many stops, starts and interruptive calls to stir up applause - deserved though applause was - didn’t make for an optimum sense of musical satisfaction.

A loose thread of music from America and Scotland, with participatory Piobaireachd humming, wasn’t sufficient to weave together a coherent whole, despite NYO2 being completely at ease in surefire favourites such as Mambo or Encanto.

With slick direction from conductor Josè-Luis Novo, an appropriately triumphant main theme from Star Wars meant time for storm-delayed free ice-cream and reflection on an unusual highlight, a rumba version of Ca’ the Yowes by Thea Musgrave.

Carol Main

First Night at the Hub ★★★★

The Hub

Finishing just before midnight, the opening night of The Hub’s informal performance series felt like being at a party with an abundance of exceptionally talented guests. An intimate soiree of EIF friends, hosted by Festival Director Nicola Benedetti in the organisation’s own front room, Monday’s curation became a sort of mini festival in its own right.

With party turns from many of this week’s artists, including Roby Lakatos and his Hungarian ensemble, a wind quintet from NYO2, the Monteverdi Choir, trad legend Dougie McLean and the storm-cancelled Barokksolistene from Norway, and everyone getting together along with Benedetti’s own in-house ensemble at the end, spontaneity and adrenaline fuelled energy were never far away.

Hard though it is to pick out a favourite, Benedetti and Lakatos in the Csárdás by Monti nailed how to pull off virtuosity with wit and charm. Even the audience created its own suitably gentle chorus rendering of This Love Will Carry Me led by McLean.

In flawlessly blended singing, the Monteverdi Choir, after a full performance at the Usher Hall earlier the same evening, brought the serenity of vocal perfection to Tavener’s Song for Athene and Bruckner’s Locus Iste.

Carol Main

Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy ★★★★★

Queen’s Hall

Head and heart collided and intermingled to breathtaking effect in Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy’s magnificent recital of piano duets and duos - though even that paltry description doesn’t do justice to their elegant, evidently choreographed movements across keyboards, sometimes intimately sharing a single instrument with wrists and fingers intertwined (it no doubt helps that they’re real-life partners), sometimes hammering imperiously at their separate pianos.

There was little hammering, though, in the concert’s limpid first half, which contrasted Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s intricate, subtly adapted arrangements of Bach with some of his own more playful, gnomic pieces. They drew inspired accounts from the two men, who brought a similar sensitivity to Bach’s eloquently rippling melodic lines and Kurtág’s ghostly clusters.

Heart came after the interval, however, with an overwhelmingly passionate account of Messiaen’s monolithic Visions de l’Amen, which again felt revealingly choreographed in Kolesnikov’s showy soloing standing in sharp contrast to Tsoy’s granitic, motoric figurations.

But their respective spectacular techniques aside, it was a vivid, visionary account, leaving no doubt as to the authentic passions of the ‘Amen du desir’ and pushing the concluding ‘Amen de la consommation’ to ever greater heights of euphoria.

Their softly spoken encore, ‘The Fairy Garden’ from Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, blossomed from elegant restraint to joy and wonder. Unforgettable.

David Kettle

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