Published on Monday 12 December 2016 Written by Garry Fraser Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending has confounded many, myself included, by repeatedly notching the number one spot in Classic FM’s top of the pops. It’s nowhere near my top 1,000 classical favourites, but if any performance was to make me reconsider, it would with the Scottish… Read more »
Published on Thursday 8 December 2016 Written by Keith Bruce UK-domiciled Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova will have been a new name to many in the churches on the Scottish Ensemble’s Candlelit Concerts tour, but it is one they will certainly have noted. Artistic director Jonathan Morton may well have acquired the idea of teaming her music… Read more »
Published on Monday 14 November 2016 Written by David Smythe The annual Hot 100 cultural contributors from Edinburgh’s magazine The List draws interest from right across the entertainment world in Scotland. Beating Donald Runnicles (80), John Butt (63) and even The Edinburgh Festival (8), emerging smoking hot in the lead this year is composer Anna Meredith…. Read more »
Published on Monday 14 November 2016 Written by Kate Molleson At the start of Ken Loach’s latest film I, Daniel Blake, the beleaguered Daniel spends hours on the phone to the Department for Work and Pensions, driven nuts by a chirpy holding jingle. Later we see Dan take a spray can to the local jobcentre: “I,… Read more »
Published on Saturday 12 November 2016 Written by Ken Walton VIVALDI’S The Four Seasons has been subject to modernisation treatment in many weird and wonderful guises, from the bovver boy interpretations of Nigel Kennedy to it being well and truly tangoed by Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla. It’s also a past and present favourite of the Scottish… Read more »
Anno, as anyone following Scottish Ensemble over the past few months will be aware, is a collaboration between Scottish Ensemble and the hotly-tipped electronic-classical crossover composer Anna Meredith. We first fell in love with the piece down in London, in June 2016, when we premiered it as part of the Spitalfields Music Summer Festival. Without wanting… Read more »