Edinburgh Festivals 2023
1 September 2023
We had a great time at the Edinburgh festivals last week. This year we decided to go for 5 days rather than our usual 7, but we still managed to see 20 shows - and we chose well. I’m grateful to Kelly for her recommendations which were among our favourites. ‘Beautiful Evil Things’ was a one-woman show from Ad Infinitum in which Deborah Pugh plays the decapitated head of Medusa telling us the story of the Trojan Wars in a tour de force of physical theatre and story-telling. ‘Her Green Hell’ was another amazing one-woman performance, from TheatreGoose, with Sophie Kean playing the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Peruvian jungle, trying to make her way to safety - the remarkable true story of Juliane Koepcke and the 1971 LANSA Flight 508 plane crash. We also loved Out of the Forest theatre’s production: ‘The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria’. King Boris III chose to ally with Hitler’s Germany rather than Russia in the Second World War but went on to undermine the Nazi’s plans, saving the lives of around 50,000 Bulgarian Jews before apparently being assassinated. Joseph Cullen and Sasha Wilson’s play with a cast of five was a hilarious comic pantomime that also managed to present a fascinating and respectful account of this forgotten episode in European history. We went to two stunning orchestral concerts at the Usher Hall. We saw the Oslo Philharmonic, conducted by Klaus Makela, give a thrilling performance of Shostakovich’s ‘Symphony No 5’. They also accompanied Yuja Wang playing both Ravel’s ‘Piano Concerto in G major’ and his ‘Piano Concerto for the Left Hand’ - which we played with the Northampton Symphony Orchestra a few years ago (reviewed here in November 2017). And we really enjoyed seeing the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra from Venezuela playing the Beethoven Choral Symphony with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus - with conductor Rafael Payare pushing the pace throughout.
Labels: Drama, Festivals, Music, Theatre
posted by Robin Simpson @ 2:17 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home