Performances in Edinburgh and London

<First published in Norman Lebrecht’s “Slipped Disc” on August 23, 2026>

I: The LA Philharmonic at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall,  14th and 15th August  

In his seventeen years as the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic – coming to an end this year – the conductor Gustavo Dudamel has achieved a major reputation.  (He goes on to direct the New York Philharmonic.) As part of the celebrations of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the United States of America, he and the orchestra have just been visiting the Albert Hall Proms (10th-11th August ) and  the Edinburgh Festival (14th-15th August ) – presenting two ancient-modern double bills, each starting with a Beethoven classic and each ending with a substantial modern magnum opus.

Their first Edinburgh programme (Friday) opened with Beethoven’sSeventh Symphony and closed with Gabriela Ortiz’s “Revolución diamantina” (a full-orchestra ballet score lasting some forty-five minutes, though apparently still awaiting a ballet staging).  Their second (Saturday 15th August), beginning with Beethoven’s Sixth, went on to the Inferno first part of Thomas Adès’s Dante trilogy (Inferno had its world premiere in 2019 in Los Angeles, as  choreographed for the Royal Ballet by Wayne McGregor, followed by its London premiere as part of McGregor’s full-evening The Dante Project in October 2021).

These impressively chosen double bills were impressively played.  Evidently, the LA Phil places faith in modern music. And the fact that both its modern works are ballets shows that it has Diaghilevian ambitions, even if Ortiz’s score has not yet been staged. For those who have not seen it, I should add that McGregor’s Infernochoreography did not begin to do justice to Adès’s score.  A basic test is always: Does this choreography help us to hear the music better?  Only now that we are hearing Adès’s Dante compositions out of their original McGregor context are we beginning to appreciate their dimensions and imagination as music.  It would take a master-choreographer to do justice to Ortiz’s complex six-act Revolución diamantina ballet, though I should like to see someone try.  It is elaborately orchestrated, moving through one soundworld after another as it proceeds.

Although his London performances made less impact on some, Dudamel’s Edinburgh accounts of the two Beethoven symphonies proved remarkable in terms of sweep, of architecture, of layered experience, and of first-rate orchestral playing. On the evidence of these performances, I wouldn’t class Dudamel quite beside the accounts of the Ninth Symphony I have heard at the Proms from Fabio Luisi (2025) and Gianandrea Noseda (2026):  those two really shaped their material with more interpretative originality.  But Dudamel’s Sixth and Seventh were both exciting and uplifting: I admired Beethoven anew in each.

II:  The Death of Gesualdo at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall, 15th  August  

The Gesualdo Six is principally a vocal ensemble, performing music that ranges from world premieres back to the Renaissance.  In their Death of Gesualdo, however, they also have a haunting work of music theatre, performed with six silent actors while they sing.  I saw this in January at St Martins in the Fields, where it will be repeated in March 2027.  And I am glad to see it again at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall.   The selection of Gesualdo music (from both secular and religious numbers) and the overall direction are by Bill Barclay, telling the dark story of Gesualdo’s marriage, of his wife’s adultery, of his punishment of the adultery with death for both lovers, all within the contained manners of a courteous and religious society.

I note that the choreography is Will Tuckett, to whom I am inclined to attribute the timing and spacing of the many tableaux vivants:  their drama seems to draw life from the dissonances in Gesualdo’s music.  Yes, you hear the music better for watching the stylised drama enacted here.

III: Matthew Hawkins at the Ocean Terminal, Leith, 16th August 

It is strange to discover that the dancer Matthew Hawkins and I were both at the 1973 Edinburgh Festival – he (then a Royal Ballet School student) as one of the Polish beach boys onstage in the original production of Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice, I as a young-adult student in the audience.  (Edinburgh was where Britten’s opera had its first performances after its Aldeburgh premiere two months before.)  Over the years, Hawkins has danced with the Royal Ballet, with the important modern-dance group Second Stride, in the sensational early work of Michael Clark, and in his own work. He has been based in Edinburgh for at least a dozen years, teaching and performing.

On the morning of Sunday 16th August at the Ocean Terminal in Leith, he – probably in his late sixties – danced a ballet-based barefoot solo that lasted an hour or more.  He was never entirely still for more than a second or two (and then as part of a larger phase);  he was never dull;  he was unfailingly original, (peculiar, too);  and he proved more engrossing as you went on watching.  What’s more, even after the first half-hour, he was producing feats of calm balance and control that would have eluded younger dancers in shorter solos.

He began on the floor, taking time before achieving vertical stance.  His body language was expansive, outstretched, but also detailed in tiny gesture.  In one motif, he flexed the fingers of one hand while walking the fingers of the other hand down the opposite forearm.  (This looked every bit as contrary as it sounds.)  In another motif, he wrapped the fingers of one hand across his bald cranium like a damp cloth.  Remarkably, his feet often passed effortlessly through the five turned-out positions of classical ballet;  and he turned his body to address all traditional ballet’s eight directions – and yet his solo never once looked remotely orthodox.  I hope I see him dance again.

IV:   Don Giovanni at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, Sunday 16th August  

Back at my first Edinburgh Festival in 1973, aged eighteen, I also saw my first performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in August 1973, at the King’s Theatre.  Peter Ustinov directed and designed;  Daniel Barenboim, then new to opera, conducted.  Roger Soyer, fabulously suave, was Don Giovanni;  Geraint Evans was Leporello;  Heather Harper was Donna Elvira, Luigi Alva was Don Ottavio. That led to a recording, as did the 1995 Edinburgh Festival concert performance of Don Giovanniat the Usher Hall, conducted by Charles Mackerras with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra:  Bo Skovhus was Giovanni, while Alessandro Corbelli, Felicity Lott, Christine Brewer, and Jerry Hadley were, respectively, Leporello, Donna Elvira,  Donna Anna, and Don Ottavio.

Okay: this year’s Edinburgh Giovanni at the Usher Hall with Maxim Emelyanychev conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, was not in the league of those earlier performances.  And yet it was at every point a real Giovanni.  Emelyanychev and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra caught both the opera’s danger and its wit: they combined weight and lightness – a perfect oxymoron for Giovanni’s singular soundworld – in a judicious amalgam of sound and dynamics.

As Giovanni and Leporello, Konstantin Krimmel and Michael Sumuel were somewhat too conscious of the effects they were making as a sardonic Don Giovanni and an oft-embarrassed Leporello, but Clive Bayley (replacing Brindsley Sherratt at short notice as the Commendatore), Louise Alder (Donna Anna), and Giovanni Sala (Don Ottavio) all made their dramas both serious and poignant. Even though I often want Alder to show a yet firmer sense of line in her Mozart roles, she’s riveting at every moment in her grasp of character, while Sala’s diction made all of Ottavio’s words naturalness itself.  I would have liked a little more recklessness from Janai Brugger as Donna Elvira, but her singing was radiant throughout.

I kept expecting Hyesang Park to become just another saccharine, winsome Zerlina, but I’m happy to say she kept showing just enough signs of mischief, acid, and anger to surprise me pleasantly.  As her Masetto, William Thomas ideally combined vulnerability and annoyance.  All these singers joined voices to marvellous effect in ensembles.

V:   Shostakovich’s Tenth, Albert Hall Proms, Tuesday, 18th August  

Are we living in an age of a second Iron Curtain? Is the régime of Vladimir Putin a successor to those of the Soviet leaders?

While we are slowly answering those questions, courses should be taught across the West about the many important works of art created in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1989 – about the music of Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, the writing of Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Bulgakin, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and more. Now that Russia has changed and changed again, the creations of these artists emerge in new lights.  The oppression of the Stalinist and subsequent Communist regimes should still appal us;  but it’s shocking to realise that the Russia of the last thirty years seems to have produced no artists of such spirit.

Conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra admirably in a very lucid and well-shaped account of Shostakovich’s powerfully absorbing Tenth, Cristian Măcelaru made me long for a Prom season that gave us all fifteen of this composer’s symphonies.  They cover a vast span of human, artistic, and political history, one from which we should all learn.

Măcelaru had begun with the UK premiere of Édith Canat de Chizy’s Skyline for three percussionists, timpani and orchestra.  Even though the full BBC Symphony was used, this was dominated by the three percussionists, each vividly differentiated.  This is a bold piece, imaginative in scope – and yet it paled beside Shostakovich’s expressive authority and intensity.

VI:   The Glyndebourne Ariadne auf Naxos, Albert Hall Proms, Wednesday 19th August 

Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos is so hugely ambitious in its backstage/onstage high-art/low-art portrait of the creative process that it seldom quite works as a whole.  This year, I was unable to attend either Glyndebourne’s new production or its Wednesday 19th August Prom performance – but, listening to the latter on the radio, I relished the naturalness with which speech and song co-existed – from the opening of the Prologue onward, with Major Domo and Music Master grasping the texture of the work from the first.  Words carried the day so much of the time that this text-heavy work relaxed, its contours falling into place under Robin Ticciati’s baton.

That was particularly true in the Prologue. In the opera itself, Rachel Willis-Sørensen is too strenuous a linguist to convince with Ariadne’s words – though the lyrical power she brought to the music was a big advance on her dismal 2025 Covent Garden Trovatore.  Samantha Hankey and Alina Wunderlin gave incisive accounts of Composer and Zerbinetta, while David Butt Philip brought off a strikingly baritonal account of Bacchus. Although I wished I had been present, I often felt I was. And Ariadne felt not over-ambitious but a marvel of imaginative complexity.

@Alastair Macaulay 2026