Venue (EIF): Usher Hall
Category: Music
Times: 22.30
Dates: Aug 7 only
Stars: ****
Reviewed by Roy Isserlis
One of the strange quirks of August is the locals vocally detest the Fringe, but love the Edinburgh International Festival’s large scale outdoor events. IF the EIF has any sense they’ll try and open every year with a similar spectacle and close with the Festival Fireworks which is seen as a fitting celebration of getting rid of the Fringe crowds and reclaiming the city.
59 Productions’ visuals certainly matched up to the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus rendition of John Adam’s choral work Harmonium. Adam’s now seems to be a fixture of the EIF with two of his previous operas being staged in 1988 and 2005, but the crowd would be more familiar with this work included in the soundtrack to last year’s film Birdman.
At no point did the visuals seem to escape the choir, the graphics from Edinburgh Uni’s Infomatics team floated over the landmark Usher Hall (with the new glass building thankfully masked off) highlighting passages of the music with abstracts of text, sync’d up faces to the choir and route travelling through a map back to the building itself. The highlights at the end were literal with a dozen moving beams of light forming a crown around the dome of the hundred year old building.
Unfortunately due to the process the team went with; the music unusually for an EIF production was not live.
SG Fringe 