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Official Festival Reviews
Festival 2008
After beating off tough competition, five members of the public have been selected to become EIF Official Festival Reviewers for the duration of Festival 08. Each of the reviewers will have seven reviews - good or bad - from a wide variety of EIF shows published on this page. The most recent reviews will appear at the top.
EIF critic Max Ribitzky on Deca Dance 2008
Surly the single most exciting dance event of the 2008 Edinburgh International Festival, Ohad Naharin's 'best of' decagonal extravaganza. Demonstrating the original arrangements that made Naharin one of the most pioneering choreographers working today, Decadance boasts all of the force and inventiveness of modern conceptual dance with none of the pretentiousness that so frequently comes with the territory.
Batsheva Dance Company's dancers are as talented as they are willfully unkempt and asexual, sporting a carefully cultivated just-rolled-out-of-bed-and-into-some-random-attire-I've-found-in-my-attic chic which seems a perfectly appropriate fit to their artistic director's asymmetrical movement philosophy. Naharin, through a host of progressive techniques such as barring the use of mirrors in his rehearsals, is able to draw raw, emotive motion and vulnerability from his terpsichoreans rather than conventionally suppressive body consciousness.
Although some of the numbers do go on for slightly too long, Decadance is a veritable tour de force of Dada influenced world dance with that oh-so-rare quality called humor. An assortment of Indian chants, pop harmonies and blaring biblical texts serve as a platform for a mix of ballet, tango, pantomime, synchronized swimming on parquet and the robot dance. It reminds one that the closest thing to true magic we can experience in real life is what happens when an artist sets movement to music in a seemingly unmanageable yet utterly exhilarating way.
EIF Critic Alexander Gandar on Deca Dance 2008.
Deca Dance 2008. It's all about PLAY. Even the name (based on the tenth anniversary of choreographer Ohad Naharin taking the top job at Batsheva Dance Company) becomes - in English - a play on the word decadence.
Decadent, though, Deca Dance is not. Naharin keeps the eclectic collection of vignettes incredibly bare, doing nothing ostentatious with sound and light, preferring the movement of the 22 dancers to transport the audience to a place of, well, juvenile fun.
And what fun it is. There's a lot based on repetition and building, including a brilliant segment with a booming voice counting and movements that correlate to the numbers, though the clear high-point is a magical sequence that really shouldn't be spoiled.
There are occasionally noticeable mistakes, though herein lays the beauty. This isn't always a show of finesse but of constant passion, which should be seen by both aficionados of both dance and entertainment alike.
EIF Critic Bridget Stevens on Devil's Ship
Although Edinburgh Festival-goers are nothing if not cosmopolitan, one feels that the cultural context of this story from Iran must have been foreign to most of the audience and that few would have been able to follow the Farsi language in which it is told. And yet it was able, by virtue of the simplicity of its narrative and the powerful, emotional performances of the five barefoot, hijab-wearing women actors, to engage and move.
The action took place on a slightly raked, sand-covered stage, in billowing smoke eerily penetrated by four white spotlights shining down from above, which was supposed to represent a remote island where the women lived a life of isolation from the rest of the world, tending two family graves. Some of the most dramatic moments occurred when the swaddled occupants of these graves were revealed. We read in the programme notes of the influence of Peter Brook and Tadeusz Kantor on the work of the Bazi Theatre Company; there were surely also Chekovian resonances in the languorous pace and the endless talk of doing something which might or might not ever happen. The arrival of the old woman Bibi with a hookah in one hand and a transistor radio in the other should not have surprised anyone as the English surtitles (not always appropriate unfortunately - too much American slang) had made it clear that the story was set in the 20th century.
Insights into Persian tradition for example the tiny funereal objects set into a baby's grave, were particularly intriguing. The sound effects too were excellent, conveying as they did the changing moods of the sea and the sounds of island wildlife. Some of the visual devices seemed a little awkward (could this have been deliberate?) but, all in all, this was a fascinating hour - and, given the rarity of appearances here by theatre companies from Iran, exactly the kind of original production that the EIF should be presenting.
EIF critic Max Ribitzky on Devil's Ship
Hunched figures, clad in dark silk, hover in a bleak and barren existence like the ghosts of a time past. Devil's Ship's five masked women are confined to an island, a fitting metaphor to the place many women still find themselves in traditional Muslim society today. Desolate, watchful, full of regret, they live in a virtual cemetery of silence, sand and sun, where the old ones keep the young ones on the island and the only hope for escape is for a man to come and whisk them away. "If you keep watching the sea, it will come into you," says one woman to the other.
Writer/Director Atilla Pessyani weaves a suspenseful tale, leaving a poignant impression through the abstract use of dark space and merely a few unbroken tonal elements. Despite a few minor blunders such as flawed supertitle design and indistinct video projections which end up distracting from the overall impact, Devil's Ship allows us a look into a world where dreams and desires are so dreaded, they are misconstrued as cursed obsessions even by those who dare to have them.
EIF critic Max Ribitzky on The Enchanted Wanderer
Modern master Rodion Shchedrin summons the full dramatic force of the Russian language, and that of his chorus and orchestra, to deliver an operatic triumph in two parts with The Enchanted Wanderer. Under the batonage of virtuoso conductor Valery Gergiev, Shchedrin's brilliantly experimental arrangements enjoy a dazzling, fiery treatment by the Mariinsky Opera Company, this year marking their 225th anniversary season. Yevgeny Akimov's agile tenor and adventurous range play off of Sergey Alexashkin's commanding bass, and all three soloists' solid performances are underscored by bursts of tribal drum trances by the orchestra's unusually large percussion section.
Based on a novella by Nikolay Leskov, whom Lenin himself condemned as a "thoroughly religious and reactionary writer," The Enchanted Wanderer indeed plays like a compilation of religious trepidation and simple human truth and humor. Leskov's writing is salaciously funny as always, and his folklorist themes drive forward a multi-layered plot which offers as many twists and turns as those of Shchedrin's earlier operas set to novels by Antonov, Gogol and Nabokov.
EIF Critic Fraser Riddell on Król Roger
Szymanowski's Król Roger examines the terrifying liberation of the Dionysian: the titular King is visited by a Shepherd- the disguised Dionysus- who threatens the Apollonian order of his existence. Described as a ‘philosophical opera', Szymanowski's frenetically intense score and this superb production from The Mariinsky Opera Company ensure that this drama never becomes obscure or academic. The music blends the expressionism of Strauss' Salome with moments of disorientating impressionism reminiscent of Debussy‘s Pelleas, yet under Valery Gergiev's charged direction this opera never seems derivative.
A superb cast is lead by Andrzej Dobber as the unhinged Roger and Pavlo Tolstoy as a genuinely disturbing Shepherd. Mariusz Trelinksi's production subtly captures the sense of Roger's mind unravelling, effectively using back-projection to simulate his dislodged consciousness. The superlative lighting design of Marc Heinz supplements this effect.
This is an abrasively disturbing, beautifully sensuous opera that deserves a more central place in the canon, and with a cast of such dramatic strength and an orchestra of such power, is the most memorable, unsettling production I've seen in Edinburgh this year. A true triumph.
EIF Critic Jon Davey on Aleko:Semyon Kotko Act III
The audience at The Usher Hall last night was treated to an enthralling double-bill of Russian opera, albeit in concert performance. It began with Rachmaninov's one-act opera Aleko. The three excellent main soloists were brilliantly supported by the orchestra and a fifty-strong choir as they told the tragic tale of Aleko and his lover Zemfira.
The second half was in fact only part of Prokofiev's five-act Soviet opera Semyon Kotko - the dramatic third act when a tale of simple village life becomes instead a story of war and brutal reprisals.
Soloists, choir and orchestra built towards a tumultuous climax, with the village set ablaze and its women folk lamenting the death of one of their men at the hands of the Germans and their Cossack allies.
There were clear similarities with Prokofiev's cinematic collaborations with Eisenstein and like seeing a concert performance of a movie score, one was left still wanting more. As the composer himself said, "When a person goes to an opera he wants not only to hear but to see". Having given us this fabulous taster, hopefully some day the Mariinsky Opera and Orchestra will return to the Edinburgh International Festival and perform the full opera.
EIF Critic Max Ribitzky on Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray
For his dance adaptation of Oscar Wilde's turn of the century masterwork The Picture of Dorian Gray, Matthew Bourne has pulled out all stops. On a beautifully minimalistic revolving stage Bourne unleashes a gamut of video art, jazz-funk and tighty whities to uncover his post-modern, or rather, nineteen nineties retro vision of the Vodka-drenched inferno of petty jealousies and self obsession called the fashion industry.
With New Adventures dancers as a troupe of mainly male models staring each other down with tormented seduction in a fierce struggle for celebrity, success and sexual satisfaction, and willfully employing less subtlety than Wilde did for his Gothic classic, Bourne effectively recreates a world where people do not turn old for fear of being replaced but, at the same time, do not grow any wiser or deeper either.
EIF Critic Fraser Riddell on Muziektheater Transparant's Ruhe
Scattered chairs, each facing in it's own direction. A continent torn apart by war, millions dead and those who survived divided by fear and retribution. Voices in perfect harmony singing from a time before all this; a land of wein und liebe, of wine and love. Theodor Adorno commented that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"- how could aesthetic pleasure ever provide spiritual balm for such agony? And how could a culture that fostered the humanism of Goethe and Schubert be capable of such atrocity?
Josse De Pauw's Ruhe juxtaposes Schubert's charmingly naïve part-songs with historical monologues of Dutch Nazi collaborators. Performed in the intimate space of The Hub, Collegium Vocale Gent take their place among the audience and stand on their chairs to sing. There is no escaping the innocent beauty of their music, nor the uncomfortable honesty and awkward humour of the monologues. As a piece of theatre, this neither preaches nor patronizes, but by means of subtle insinuation asks probing questions about the relationship between art and society. Does the retreat into aesthetic transcendence blind us to brutal reality? Or is it the role of art to repair a broken society?
Ruhe is an innovative piece of theatre that forces the viewer to find their own connections between the brutal and the beautiful.
EIF Critic Fraser Riddell on The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Charles MacKerras with piano by Alfred Brendel
Young conductors are novel, fashionable and marketable - but Charles Mackerras still bestrides the narrow world of Dudamel and friends like a colossus of classical music. This performance with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (SCO) enshrined everything we have come to expect from this superlative musician: performances of nuanced detail, fresh insight and energetic verve. Only Mackerras could take the hackneyed old war-horse of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 and mould a performance buzzing with such exuberant electricity: the ascending motif of the final movement seemed to sky-rocket to the stars.
Alfred Brendel brought wealth of insight to Mozart's C minor Piano Concerto, but such was his musicianship that this never seemed like a soloistic performance- this was chamber music at its most intimate and subtle. Never have I heard wind playing so perfectly balanced, blended into one unified voice. Mackerras pleasingly brought to the fore Mozart's sublime bassoon writing, played with charming lyricism by Peter Whelan.
Dvorak's Nocturne and Czech Suite evoked a spectrum of orchestral colours, from the jubilant to the melancholic, and proved that not only are the SCO world-class Mozartians, but that they can do rustic just as well as refined. In Mackerras, the Edinburgh Festival could not have a more worthy Honorary President.
EIF Critic Bridget Stevens on Chunky Move's Mortal Engine
As the audience reeled out of last night's European premiere of Mortal Engine by Australian contemporary dance company Chunky Move, words like ‘amazing', ‘stunning', ‘extraordinary' hardly seemed to do the performance justice. For this had been fifty-five minutes of human bodies morphing as if by magic into light images, then into sound, and back again.
One body became two, two became one. A large moving blob of amoeba-like creatures swallowed up everything in its path. Laser displays diminished the dancers, then magnified them. Giant tangles of spiders' webs were created, and exploding snowflakes, and splintering abstract shapes. All in edgy black and white and to the accompaniment of digitally-created sound which ranged from crackling static to haunting melody. At one point, the stage was filled with dry ice, which seemed somehow old fashioned after all the digital wizardry.
When the smoke was penetrated by a beam of bright green light, which the dancers appeared to manipulate with their hands, the audience had a weird and slightly scary sensation of tumbling along inside a huge tunnel. As to the meaning of the piece, well, I suppose it was broadly about relationships. The six dancers were fabulous and, whilst we could perhaps have done with seeing more of them, the dancing was beautifully integrated with the visuals and the sounds.
EIF Critic Bridget Stevens on Twittering Machine
Last night's audience filed into the magnificent Palmhouse at the Botanic Gardens not altogether sure what they were going to see or hear. In the event we had a memorable, multi-sensory experience on the general theme of birdsong in music.
Paul Klee's painting Twittering Machine and Messiaen's music had been selected as creative starting points for a project carried out by the Festival's Education Department, and dozens of tiny, multi-coloured wire sculptures of birds, bees, flowers etc created by local schoolchildren were dotted around the palmhouse. We sat on balustrades, flowerpots and the ground, the scent of lush green foliage filling our nostrils, to listen to five young musicians perform a short programme of work by young composers, some of them still at school.
The final piece, The Twittering Machine by Alasdair Nicolson (slightly older than the others but not by much) showed why his music has won so much critical acclaim. I have no idea how the Festival organised it but, while this last piece was being played, a real, live Edinburgh robin flew in, perched on the rim of a flowerpot, sat quietly until the applause broke out, and then took off again. A magical moment to round off a magical half hour.
EIF Critic Jon Davey on Steve Reich Evening.
Part concert, part dance, part performance art, the Steve Reich Evening at the Festival Theatre is an enthralling blend of minimalist music and choreography and an excellent primer in ‘process music'.
The concept is introduced through the simple swinging of two microphones but most of the rest of the programme is played on more conventional instruments. Except that is for ‘Poeme Symphonique', ‘played' on one hundred metronomes. When the dancers make their appearance they create visual patterns that slip in and out of synch just as the music slips in and out of phase. The repetition of sound and movements is hypnotic, inducing a state of meditative calm.
Watching the almost machine-like performances it is strangely difficult not to see the most human of behaviours, of friendship and of belonging. And that's worlds away from those two swinging microphones.
EIF Critic Bridget Stevens on Jidariyya
Naturally this production by the National Theatre of Palestine has been given added poignancy by the death last week of the poet Mahmoud Darwish. All the more so as the main protagonist is a man musing on life and death as he lies in hospital after heart surgery - very similar to the circumstances of Darwish's own death.
The thumping sound of a heart beating eerily fills the silences between episodes of live music, speech and song. The visual imagery is stunning and the silhouetted figures of refugees trudging up the hill with their suitcases will remain with me for a long time. A programme note by the author reveals that for him "death is the death of language", and language is an important, if unsatisfactorily represented to us non-Arabic speakers, component of this piece.
One senses that the poetry of the original is exquisitely beautiful, but the English in the supertitles is sometimes a little clunky. However, he central performance by Makram J. Koury is faultless and I found the whole thing deeply moving.
EIF Critic Alexander Gandar on TR Warszawa's production of the Sarah Kane play 4.48 Psychosis.
Martin Amis once wrote that suicide is the greatest form of murder. It isn't the killing of the self but rather the killing of all the world. This end of the emotional scale is where Grzegorz Jarzyna's production of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis succeeds: there is enough ire in Magdalena Cielecka's doomed protagonist to kill galaxies.
Where the play fails is finding the polemic - the comedy in the tragedy. Suicide is rarely amusing, naturally, but what else to do with lines like ‘I dreamt I went to the doctor's and she gave me eight minutes to live - I'd been sitting in the fucking waiting room half an hour.' than laugh? Kane was angry, no doubt, but also horrifically talented and blessed with a love of dramaturgy so deep she was still able to laugh at the futility in the world and give everything in between, no matter how "ill".
At least the one-note of this play is of complex tone, and Jarzyna often creates striking and stark images, leaning heavily on David Lynch for both aural and visual influences. 4.48 will never be an easy watch or an easy write, but it will always be a challenging work by one of the most important dramatists to grace the 20th century.
EIF Critic Bridget Stevens on Behind the Scenes: Mahmoud Darwish by Professor Sabry Hafez
This session was not supposed to be about a dead poet. However, in one of the specially created, darkened performance spaces upstairs in the Hub where it took place, Professor Hafez had to begin by announcing the death only a few days ago of the subject of his talk, Mahmoud Darwish. He described widespread coverage in the Arabic media of the loss of one of the foremost Arabic poets of the 20th/21st centuries.
The first part of Professor Hafez's presentation consisted of a rapid-fire listing of dates and events from Darwish's life, most of which had been devoted to championing the Palestinian cause. For me the second part was more interesting and revealing, when Hafez shared with us some of his personal memories of Darwish as a friend and colleague. We heard for example how his reserve was often taken for arrogance but was in fact a sign of shyness. And that his favourite author was fellow-communist Pablo Neruda.
The question and answer session afterwards included an interesting discussion about a commonly held misperception that Arab identity is to be defined by reference to Islam. It would have been good to hear more from Professor Hafez about Jidariyya, the adaptation of a Darwish poem which is being staged at the Royal Lyceum Theatre until Sunday 17 August. The EIF brochure tells us that the main character in the play, a poet, has just come through heart surgery and is musing on his life, his art and his mortality. It was heart disease that killed Darwish less than a week before the show was due to open. How ironic and tragic.
EIF Critic Fraser Riddell on Israel in Egypt
Few would argue that Handel's Israel in Egypt matches the spiritual scope of Messiah or the dramatic weight of Samson, yet it is the duty of a progressive festival to present such lesser known works for re-evaluation.
Unusually in Handel's oratorio repertoire, the success of this work depends almost entirely on the quality of the chorus. The Edinburgh Festival Chorus, rejuvenated under the guidance of Christopher Bell, performed with focus and drive, but ultimately lacked the subtlety of inflexion required to bring this music fully to life: Handel's double choruses can jump off the page in a rainbow of exuberance, here they sounded merely dully academic.
Yet Emmanuelle Haim is evidently a conductor with exciting things to say; the SCO responded with charged dynamic contrast and surging dramatic momentum. Counter-tenor soloist Robin Blaze proved the highlight of the evening with a performance of understated expressiveness supplemented by crystal clear diction.
Israel in Egypt: worth revisiting? On the basis of this performance, the jury's still out.
EIF Critic Alexander Gander on Chant Wars
I love being agnostic. It means I can delve into the beauty of religion without having to worry about things like, you know, the meaning of it all. Such is the case with Chant Wars, set suitably in the vaulting nave of Greyfriars Kirk.
The product of the meeting of two renowned chant groups (Sequentia and Dialogos); Chant Wars may sound like the 3rd century version of a street-style dance-off but, while exposing the "myth of Gregorian Chant" (and exploring the geographical idiosyncrasies of the form), this show feels like anything but battle.
Drenched to the eyeballs in history, a collection of men (and one woman) sing words older than I can fathom and they are delivered with such a painful and aching beauty that perhaps it is best to simply close your eyes and let the warmth of the beautiful noise envelop you. Not to be missed.
EIF Critic Bridget Stevens on Sister Marie Keyroux and Ensemble de la Paix
Forget the birdlike physique and sweet breathy voice of the French Sister who trilled her way into the charts in the 1960s with Dominique, -nique, - nique. Sister Marie is a very different kind of singing nun: a big woman, with a big voice that suited the superb acoustic of Greyfriars Kirk perfectly.
She presented a unique programme of chants from various traditions of the Eastern Catholic Church with support from her Ensemble de la Paix, a group of seven singers and five instrumentalists which she herself formed during the bombing of her native Lebanon. This was quite a physical performance: at times she kept her eyes closed for minutes on end as if in a trance and sometimes used her large expressive hands to emphasize mood or emotion. Although Sister Marie was the dominant figure both visually and vocally, there were also some glorious solo contributions from the percussionist and the bouzouki player.
This kind of music is probably unfamiliar to most western ears, but the rich variety of tone and mood, especially in the Liturgy of the Passion, held the audience in rapt attention throughout. These early evening Greyfriars concerts are again proving extremely popular and, if this one is anything to go by, it is easy to understand why. A rare treat indeed.
EIF Critic, Jon Davey, on The State Ballet of Georgia's Mixed Bill.
The State Ballet of Georgia's Mixed Bill began with the simple flowing movements in the opening of Chaconne. It progressed through the more formal dances later in that piece, the interesting couple dances in Duo Concertant and the complex interweaving of the six dancers in Bizet Variations. However it was during Sagalobeli that I felt myself transported to another country. When the dancers were silhouetted against a bright backdrop it was as if they were dancing along the crest of a hill in the moments after sunset. When fully lit, the striking brown and fawn costumes strongly evoked the folk tradition and the exuberant dancing delighted the audience. It was an energetic climax to the evening.
EIF Critic, Alexander Gandar, on Barrie Kosky's The Tell-tale Heart.
Barrie Kosky's The Tell-Tale Heart (adapted from an Edgar Allan Poe poem) begins, suitably, with a full minute of complete darkness before a single spot slowly rises on Martin Niedermair's terrified and terrifying face. From there we dive dreamily into familiar Poe territory, an unrelenting place, coiled in horror and triumph.
Niedermair's performance as the conflicted murderer is nearly faultless, his every tic and squeal visibly haunting. If there are occasional hints at over-performance it comes off deliberately so - the melodramatic content and heinousness of the crime justify his histrionics.
Paul Jackson's chiaroscuro lighting truly exacts Poe's sense of terror, his design perfectly reflecting the thematic schizophrenia, morphing Neidermair's face into unrecognisable shapes with chasms of shadow.
There is nothing simple about Kosky's theatre, it is musical, physical, and never less than a riveting piece that manages to fulfil the gothic intention of every grimy word.
EIF Critic, Fraser Riddell, on Smetana's The Two Widows.
The charm of this production of Smetana's ‘The Two Widows' lies in the fact that it clearly doesn't take itself too seriously. While the garishly coloured set and the chorus' strikingly verismo impression of dancing drunken peasants had a hint of am-dram village panto about them, the central operatic performances were near faultless.
Kate Valentine was clearly having the time of her life as Karolina and Jane Irwin's quasi-Wagnerian Act II scena evoked a palpable depth of pathos. Their vocal and dramatic double-act was one of undoubtable on-stage chemistry. Francesco Corti's conducting brought warmth and vivacity to the score; the music easily surpassing the shallow depths of an English libretto reminscent of Gilbert & Sullivan's lesser efforts.
See it for Valentine- another home-grown rising star. And for an irreverent, irrelevant sight-gag that will have you laughing in spite of yourself.
It won't change your life, but for a fix of feel-good farce it can't be beat.
EIF Critic, Bridget Stevens on the Opening Concert of Festival 08 - The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.
Much is expected of EIF Opening Concerts, and this one did not disappoint. The alienation effect integral to Brecht's dramatic writing was created here not by words projected on to a backdrop but by printed programme notes and by the concert performance format itself. Despite the expressive singing of the soloists, the limited amount of acting they were able to do in their fixed line-up and the small number of small props they had at their disposal rendered it all a bit static and unreal. Anthony Dean Griffey as Jim Mahoney was outstanding, but the narrator Hannah Gordon seemed dwarfed both visually and vocally. Kurt Weill's scores often involve non-classical instruments and last night's audience clearly loved the zither in particular. A reduced, all-male Festival Chorus and seventeen female singing students from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama provided solid support. The richest moments came during some glorious ensemble singing and playing. The hurricane song succeeded well in setting the mood of panic and foreboding, while the familiar Alabama song was exquisitely haunting and elegiac. The didactic message, another characteristic of Brecht-Weill collaborations, was delivered subtly yet clearly and never got in the way of the magnificent operatic elements of the work. A most memorable evening.
