Festival openings

The Edinburgh Festival’s annual opening concert in the traditionally teetotal surroundings of the Usher Hall - consisting so often of a large-scale, mind-cleansing, ecumenically inoffensive choral masterpiece - only once in my experience caused preliminary uproar of a sort which today would  inspire disbelief.   That was when Sir Thomas Beecham announced that he would conduct Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and found his performance banned by the Scottish Kirk as a piece of mischievous popery. Though Beecham was never a man to back down when faced with opposition, he conducted, if I remember rightly, the Ninth Symphony instead.

Today such problems no longer arise. The Usher Hall has for some years served alcohol and the Festival does not need to be unveiled with a religiously impeccable opening Sunday concert  - though I must admit that the only time I myself strongly objected to the content of the opening programme was when Frank Dunlop launched the Festival with the Nazi vulgarity of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.  “What’s wrong with a spot of vulgarity,” were the words with which Frank countered my opposition.  It wasn’t the vulgarity that was objectionable, I replied. It was the politics of the composer.

Under Sir Jonathan Mills’s aegis, the problem - even if it still existed - has been sidestepped with ease. The Sunday night opening concert is a thing of the past. This year the opening concert will be on Friday, August 7. Though still a vocal event, featuring the Festival Chorus and Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the composers who have been chosen are an arresting mixture of Schoenberg, Scriabin, and Debussy, with the invigorating and amiably subversive Oliver Knussen as conductor.

Schoenberg was a composer chased from Europe by his Nazi foes. The inclusion of  Debussy’s Martyrdom of St Sebastien is clearly a tribute to the Festival’s theme this year, inspired by Albert Camus’s declaration that “it is the destiny of the artist not to serve those who make history, but to serve those who are its victims.”

The point will be underlined the following night when Donald Runnicles and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra perform the young Benjamin Britten’s pacifist Sinfonia da Requiem, commissioned by the Japanese and banned by them before it could be performed.
5 July 2014