Music in London and in Edinburgh

<First published in Norman Lebrecht’s “Slipped Disc” on August 14, 2026>

I:  Thomas Adès conducts the National Youth Orchestra at the Proms, Saturday 8th August

The composer Thomas Adès is also a pianist and a conductor: he can be electrifying in both capacities. His choice of repertory makes him, to my mind, the musical equivalent of the playwright Patrick Marber, who is a superb director of other people’s work as well as his own. At the Albert Hall Proms on Saturday 8th August, Adès conducted the National Youth Orchestra, to sensational effect, in a brilliant triple bill – Liszt’s Mephisto Valse;  Part 2 (Purgatorio) of his own Dante ballet (new at Covent Garden in 2021); and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.  (He used material from the Liszt valse in his Dante Part 1, as did Kenneth MacMillan in his 1978 Mayerling.)

Wonderfully mobile from the waist, astoundingly incisive with his right-hand baton and thrillingly firm with every gesture of his left hand, Adès was inspiring to watch and inspiring in his effect on the entirely teenage musical ensemble. (I have never seen him so warm to his musicians.) This performance confirmed that his  Dante Purgatorio, incorporating – and building from – Sephardic chants from the Adès family’s own heritage, is the most impressive and substantial part of that ballet’s music.  And it made a yet stronger impression at the Albert Hall, with the outsize orchestra well spaced, than it had when new at Covent Garden.  (Remarkably, the L.A.Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, will play the Liszt-based part 1 of the Adès “Dante Project” ballet, “Inferno”; at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Saturday 15: it will be fascinating to hear two thirds of the same trilogy under two important conductors, one week apart.)

The Symphonie fantastique  has been a famously original work for almost two centuries.  And yet at this performance, in the extremes of its soundworld and subjectivity of its imagination, it was every bit as shocking, innovative, and exciting as it has ever been. This whole programme placed Adès as an heir to the Romantic tradition, actively connected to the driving impetus and intense colours of music written by radical composers two centuries ago.

II: Beth Taylor, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, Tuesday 11th August

11am recitals have been part of the Edinburgh Festival for decades – I even remember them (in the 1970s) at the Leith Town Hall and at the more central Freemasons Hall. I remember Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Renee Fleming (never better), Richard Goode, Felicity Lott, András Schiff, Elisabeth Söderström, Dawn Upshaw, Galina Vizhnevskaya, Anne Sofie von Otter and many more in these morning-start conditions.

This year, the Scottish mezzosoprano Beth Taylor – who has been making striking impressions in England and abroad for several years now – made her Edinburgh International Festival debut in a Queen’s Hall recital on Tuesday, accompanied by her close colleague the pianist Hamish Brown.

Taylor has been among the most exceptional British voices in opera and concert for more than three years – I was first electrified by her Bradamante in Glyndebourne’s Handel Alcina in 2022 (next month she returns to the role in her Covent Garden debut) and by her Sorceress in the Pomo d’Oro (Joyce DiDonato) Purcell Dido and Aeneas in April 2023. Since then, I have admired her in music from Handel via Rossini to Mahler and Elgar. Taylor’s voice itself is so rich, dark, vibrant, and dangerous that it makes a burning impression; and she’s an intelligent, eloquent artist.

On this occasion, especially once the first few songs were past, her voice was firmer and more settled than in her April recital at the Wigmore Hall. In bygone days when contralti had strong upper registers, I would certainly have called her a contralto, but it is better to find her uncategorisable. She and Brown focused on women composers (Hildegard von Bingen, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Clara Schumann, Ethel Smyth, Lili Boulanger, Alma Mahler, Germaine Tailleferre, Connie Converse, Augusta Holmès), women writers, (J L Williams) and women characters (Cassandra, Lorelei, Medusa). Two male composers who have written for her – the Welsh Cameron Biles-Liddell and the Scottish Stuart MacRae – were both present; she sang Biles-Liddell’s beautiful pair of songs The Breakers and his arrangement of the haunting Orkney folk song The Grey Selkie o’ Sule Skerry, and , unforgettably, she gave the world premiere of MacRae’s Medusa. Medusa is a song cycle to words by JL Williams; it must be heard soon in London and other cities. Williams’s words investigate the multiple meanings of the Medusa that readers of Mary Beard’s Women and Power will already know. MacRae sets the words memorably; and Taylor attacks words and vocal lines with blaze, eloquence, venom, danger, wit, power, and pathos.

III, IV, V:   Further Queen’s Hall events and non-events

At short notice, the American tenor Lawrence Brownlee cancelled his Edinburgh Queen’s Hall recital at 24 hours notice, “due to circumstance beyond our control”.  (“We will be very happy to transfer your ticket(s) to an alternative event (subject to availability). Please contact our friendly Box Office team to discuss your options or receive a refund.”)

But why? There was no explanation;  and no replacement.

On Thursday 13th the Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe made his Edinburgh International Festival debut with a solo recital, ranging from the Renaissance  to the modern, from Mudarra and Dowland to, yes, Thomas Adès.  He is a marvellous artist who can reveal the classicism in Adès, the romanticism in the baroque, always as if opening windows around the music. His only flaw discernible to me is that he’s so soft-spoken he soon becomes inaudible even when speaking with an outsize microphone.

And at 11am on Friday 14th, the Venice Baroque Orchestra, directed from the keyboard by Andrea Marcon, played Geminiani’s concerto grosso La Folia,  four Vivaldi concerti, and one Handel concerto grosso.  For a second encore, Marcon brought the Edinburgh Festival’s director, the violinist Nicola Benedetti, to play solo in one more Vivaldi.  Laughingly, she explained that when she had specified something on the slow side to Marcon, he instead had specified something on the fast side.  She compromised with what she called “something not too fast”.  The glee with which the Venetian players (one of them from the same district of Venice as Vivaldi) responded to Benedetti, and she to them, was palpable.

@Alastair Macaulay, 2026