Cultural Dessert

Edinburgh Festivals 2022

2 September 2022

It was great to be back at the Edinburgh Festivals last week, for the first time since 2018. It did feel a little less busy than our last pre-pandemic festival, and the streets were strewn with rubbish because of strike action affecting bin collection. Nevertheless, in most aspects it did seem like things were getting back towards normal. We managed to see 27 shows during our week in Edinburgh - almost all of a surprisingly high standard. We saw two brilliant orchestral concerts at the Usher Hall as part of the Edinburgh International Festival: the Czech Philharmonic, conducted by Semyon Bychkov, gave a stunning performance of Mahler’s ‘Symphony No 7’; and the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, were incredibly engaging and entertaining in Florence Price’s ‘Symphony No 1’. This symphony, premiered in 1932, was the first work by a Black woman composer to be performed by a major US orchestra and it’s a lovely piece which deserves to be more widely performed. At the Edinburgh International Book Festival we saw the actor Alan Cumming talking about his recent memoir ‘Baggage’. Our pick of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival included fringe veteran comedian Simmon Munnery - on particularly good form this year - and our belated discovery of the wonderfully funny and likeable musical duo Jonny & The Baptists (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdR8e08ng9M). We enjoyed two excellent quintessential fringe one-person biographical plays: Alison Skilbeck’s ‘Mrs Roosevelt Flies to London’ and Tayo Aluko’s ‘Call Mr. Robeson’. Seeing the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh production of ‘The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart’ by David Greig and Wils Wilson in the amazing setting of the University of Edinburgh Playfair Library felt like proper ‘event theatre’ and was great fun. Emily Bruni was brilliant in Matt Wilkinson’s one-woman play ‘Psychodrama’ at the Traverse Theatre. And we rounded off our week in Edinburgh with another outstanding solo performance - Samuel Barnett in ‘Feeling Afraid as If Something Terrible Is Going to Happen’, written by Marcelo Dos Santos and directed by Matthew Xia, at the Roundabout at Summerhall. As always Edinburgh in August felt like a cultural top-up which should keep us going for the next year.

Labels: Books, Comedy, Concerts, Drama, Festivals, Music, Theatre

posted by Robin Simpson @ 9:38 am