High summer in Edinburgh: hard hat, hi-vis vest, steel toe-cap boots. Not a festival fashion tip, though it could be, but the essentials for a first glimpse of a hidden site in the city centre now being cleared for a 1,000 seat concert hall, the Scottish capital’s first dedicated new venue for music in a century. To add “state of the art” is redundant. Designed by David Chipperfield Architects (Turner Contemporary, Margate; the Hepworth, Wakefield, the Neues Museum, Berlin), with acoustics by Nagata, involved with all the most enviable new concert halls (Philharmonie, Paris; Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg; Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles), the ingredients are world class.
This is Nagata’s first UK project. With so much gloom about music elsewhere in Britain – read the damning report from the ISM (Independent Society of Musicians), published last week, on the impact of Brexit – it’s impossible not to be excited at the building’s ambition: a flexible, mid-sized hall to complement Edinburgh’s beloved Queen’s Hall and Usher Hall. Named after the charitable trust that is the main donor, the Dunard Centre will open in 2027. That same year, the long awaited National Centre for Music, scaled back from its original scheme but still with an emphasis on music education, choirs and orchestras in the locality, will open at the former Royal High School, the distinctive Greek revival building on Calton Hill.
To complete this cycle of change in a city so grounded in tradition, the international festival has a new artistic director, the violinist Nicola Benedetti. Her tagline for the season, borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr, is “Where do we go from here?”. An insightful answer will have to wait. The trio of excellent concerts I heard could have graced any season, but Benedetti is sharp enough to know that whatever her aims long term, individual experience counts above all: “A festival is simply a celebration of having a great time together… We all need to feel a part of something much larger than ourselves.”
That sense of collaboration is key to any performance, especially when a top-flight orchestra squeezes on to a stage in a full auditorium. On consecutive nights in Usher Hall last Monday and Tuesday, the Oslo Philharmonic gave concerts with their chief conductor since 2020, Klaus Mäkelä. At 27, his career is galloping: he also holds conducting posts with the Orchestre de Paris and the Royal Concertgebouw, Amsterdam. As the wheel turns, the unthinkable happens, and a giant such as Daniel Barenboim, 80, fades from a pre-eminence lasting more than half a century; Mäkelä is among the few who could fill that gap. He will need musical wisdom. He appears to have it.
The music of his countryman, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), is already a speciality. He and the Oslo players have recorded the symphonies, to high praise. They performed the last, the Seventh, on Monday. Written without a break between movements, sounds erupting from the depths like molten rock, this mysterious work is shaped by a solo trombone (Audun Breen), each entry transfigured by harmony and context. The intense concentration of conductor and orchestra alike, with first and second violins divided across the stage, cellos and violas powering from the middle, gave magnificence and glinting spirit to this account.
Mahler’s Symphony No 4, played with equal skill, was less convincing, in part because of the lively but uneven acoustic of Usher Hall. Instead of being organic and whole, the instrumental lines in Mahler’s music explode, flit and flicker, teeming and unsettling. Here, woodwind and brass lurched into dominance at odd places, brilliant yet toppling the balance, creating splashes of sonic colour where you least expected. The Swedish soprano Johanna Wallroth was the soloist in the last movement, delicate and pure-voiced, but the end was an anticlimax. I have felt that way before about this symphony. I will try to be converted, to both work and performance, when the concert is broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 13 September.
Yuja Wang crowned the next night’s Oslo programme as soloist in Ravel’s two piano concertos, for the left hand, and in G major. Her partnership with Mäkelä – they wowed a Proms audience earlier this month – has triggered a greater warmth in her playing, a welcome quality to add to her crystalline virtuosity. Her finest playing came in the affecting middle movement of the G major work, played with the intimacy of chamber music. The jazzy outer movements dazzled. The concert was titled “Yuja Wang plays Ravel”. It could have been called “The Oslo Philharmonic plays Shostakovich”. His Symphony No 5 (1937), a work of roaring terror imbued with politics, occupied the second half. In this terrific performance, low woodwind, principal horn, trumpet, and percussion were outstanding. The strings, violas now on the outside, let rip in that triumphal final march, repeated high notes sawing out above the remorseless thud of the timpani, as a sickly sense of hope emerged. The first Leningrad audience is said to have wept at the slow movement. You can see why.
Two other star pianists, Leif Ove Andsnes and Bertrand Chamayou, Norwegian and French respectively, gave a duo recital of works by Franz Schubert and György Kurtág – a selection of his sonnet-like miniatures, Játékok [Games] – at the Queen’s Hall. Together or apart, equal partners, supreme musicians, they ended with Schubert’s masterly Fantasie in F minor. D940 (1828), written the year he died. Its ebb and flow, from soft oscillation to contrapuntal despair and back, could be analysed in terms of its free form, its harmony, its structural genius. Or we could think of it as a study of serenity and sorrow, a meditation on acceptance. That’ll do just as well.
Star ratings (out of five):
Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra/Mäkelä:
Sibelius/Mahler ★★★★
Ravel/Shostakovich ★★★★
Leif Ove Andsnes and Bertrand Chamayou ★★★★
• This article was amended on 29 August 2023 to better reflect the role of Nagata with regard to the Philharmonie, Paris. An earlier version said the firm was “responsible for” the acoustics; while it advised the architect on acoustics throughout, the project’s lead acoustician was Sir Harold Marshall of Marshall Day.
