Fifty years on

Edinburgh’s New Town Concerts are celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this season with a survey of the  art of the string quartet.

Starting with America’s superb Emerson Quartet - hailed over here as the voice of Manhattan -  in November, followed by Britain’s youthful Belcea Quartet, all four events will feature a leading international ensemble playing key works from the repertoire. Though Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Shostakovich will have pride of place, there will also be dashes of Bach and Purcell and some touches of exotica, including music by that colourful South American, Alberto Ginastera.

The New Town Concerts were launched at a time when, apart from the Festival’s memorable morning concerts at the Freemasons’ Hall, chamber music had a scanty, vulnerable presence in Edinburgh.

Once the great visiting quartets had been and gone in August and September, Ruth D’Arcy Thompson’s winter chamber concerts in the Freemasons’ Hall struggled to keep things going  with the help of the Amadeus and similar quartets, but in the end collapsed through lack of funds.

 It was then that, in recognition of the aching gap in Edinburgh’s concert life, the New Town Concerts were founded and have thrived ever since. Although, like the Festival, these concerts  employed the Freemasons’ Hall as their setting, they switched to the Queen’s Hall when these surroundings became available in the nineteen-seventies and have found their home there ever since. Long may they triumph.
16 September 2014